Call for observations
The minor shower 66 Draconid (541 SDD) which was discovered by the Croatian Meteor Network (Šegon et al., 2014) has a mean orbit based on 43 meteors, similar to the orbit of 2001 XD. The asteroid 2001 XD has an orbit typical for Jupiter family comets and therefore may be a dormant comet. The shower activity ranges from November 23 until December 21.
According to Jérémie Vaubaillon there is a reasonable good encounter factor (0.67, see for more information the recent paper Vaubaillon, 2016) indicating a possible enhanced activity on December 2 (~21h30m UT) and December 3 (~7h UT), from a radiant at RA = 310° and decl. = +64°. These meteors are very slow moving with an entrance velocity of 21 km/s.
All meteor observers are encouraged to pay attention to any possible meteors from this source, although no outburst or any anything spectacular has to be expected.
The orbital data are:
|
Source:
|
541 SDD
|
2001 XQ
|
|
S.L.
|
255.2
|
|
|
RA
|
302
|
|
|
Decl.
|
62
|
|
|
Vg
|
18.2 km/s
|
|
|
q
|
0.981
|
1.035
|
|
e
|
0.657
|
0.716
|
|
ω
|
184.8
|
190.1
|
|
Ω
|
255.2
|
251.4
|
|
I
|
27.2
|
29
|
References
Šegon D., Gural P., Andreić Ž., Skokić I., Korlević K., Vida D. and Novoselnik F. (2014). “New showers from parent body search across several video meteor databases”. WGN, 42, 57-64.
Vaubaillon J. (2016). “A (revised) confidence index for the forecasting of meteor showers”. In Roggemans A. and Roggemans P., editors, Proceedings of the International Meteor Conference, Egmond, the Netherlands, 2-5 June 2016. Pages 302–303.
