Clear nights May 2019 are yielding many coincident meteors at CAMS-Florida

Clear nights have been yielding 30-40 coincident meteors each night for the past week. Attached is a map of CAMS-Florida ground tracks that show 26 coincident meteors from the night of 30-31 May 2019.

Of interest is the bolide at 09:21:21 UT seen by four cameras: CAMS 234 & 5000 (Gainesville), CAMS 5020 (College of Central Florida), and CAMS 233 (Florida Institute of Technology). Traveling in a northwesterly direction, the meteor’s duration was slightly more than 1/2 second. It popped into view at 110 km altitude and then disappeared at 79 km.

The object had perihelion barely inside earth’s orbit and aphelion just inside Jupiter’s orbit; evidently, it belonged to the Jupiter family of comets & debris with inclination i = 144 degrees (i.e., retrograde orbit). The meteoroid encountered earth at 63.2 km/sec. UFOOrbit makes it possible to do these calculations using CAMS data.

The main CAMS web page lists each night’s coincident events with meteor radiants plotted on the celestial sphere.

http://cams.seti.org/FDL/index-FL.html

J. Andreas (Andy) Howell
Coordinator, CAMS-Florida, USA