2019 Camelopardalid (CAM#451) outburst as seen by Global Meteor Network stations in New Mexico

By Denis Vida and Peter Eschman

Global Meteor Network stations in New Mexico recorded three Camelopardalid (CAM#451) orbits during the predicted 2019 outburst. Here we present the details of observations and give the parameters of estimated orbits.

 

1 Introduction

The young Camelopardalid meteor shower, produced by the comet 209P/LINEAR, had an outburst in 2019. The main peak was predicted around 7^h44^m UT on 24 May at a very high declination geocentric radiant of RA=123.2°, Dec=+79.9°. The timing of the outburst favored observers in the western part of North America, Pacific, and Eastern Asia. A trail ejected in 1939 was predicted to cause this outburst of low activity (ZHR around 10). The modelling and prediction were done by Mikhail Maslov [1].

The Global Meteor Network (GMN) [2] is a world-wide network of low-cost meteor stations running open-source software on Raspberry Pi single-board computers. See Vida et al. (2019) for more details.

Three Camelopardalids were recorded by GMN stations in New Mexico (Figures 2, 6 and 7). Five different stations recorded these meteors, and observations were manually reduced using the tools in the RMS library [3] to ensure measurement quality, and the trajectories were computed using the Monte Carlo method of Vida et al. (2019).

 

2 Results

The three Camelopardalids were recorded in a ~4 hour window, from 04^h45^m to 09^h00^m UTC on May 24. Figure 1 shows their orbits, and Table 1 lists their orbital elements. We note that all observations were within ~1 degree of the predicted radiant at RA=123.2°, Dec=+79.9°, possibly indicating a tight radiant dispersion. Nevertheless, no concrete conclusions about the dispersion can be made due to small number statistics. Our observations also agree well with values reported by other observers for the much larger 2014 outburst.

 

 

Table 1 – The radiant and orbit data compared to recent values from literature. Note that the reported uncertainties estimate the measurement precision, not the absolute accuracy.

Orbit	λʘ (°)	αg (°)	δg (°)	vg (km/s)	a (AU)	q (AU)	e	ω (°)	Ω (°)	i (°)	Π (°)
20190524_044439	62.49	116.9 ±0.8	+79.7 ±0.1	15.63 ±0.05	2.57 ±0.03	0.9640 ±0.0005	0.625 ±0.004	151.1 ±0.2	62.5	20.88 ±0.06	213.57 ±0.19
20190524_072227	62.60	125.4 ±2.0	+79.6 ±0.4	14.91 ±0.06	2.41 ±0.03	0.9702 ±0.0011	0.598 ±0.005	152.6 ±0.4	62.6	20.10 ±0.17	215.22 ±0.40
20190524_085835	62.66	120.4 ±1.3	+78.9 ±0.2	15.61 ±0.03	2.68 ±0.04	0.9657 ±0.0009	0.639 ±0.004	151.8 ±0.3	62.7	20.61 ±0.07	214.46 ±0.31
2014 Jenniskens et al. (2018)	62.8	120.0	+78.7	15.3	2.59	0.966	0.627	151.5	62.8	20.2
Annual Jenniskens et al. (2018)	62.9	119.7	+79.8	15.6	2.58	0.965	0.626	151.4	62.9	20.9

 

 

 

To give the readers some insight into the data, we give several plots. Figure 3 shows the lag (the distance that the meteoroid falls behind an object with a constant velocity that is equal to the initial meteoroid velocity) of the first observed meteor. As it can be seen, the meteor shows obvious deceleration. Figure 4 shows the ground track and the four stations that observed the second meteor, and Figure 5 shows the spatial fit residuals for the third meteor. The average angular fit residuals for all meteors were on the order of 1 arc minute.

 

 

 

 

This is a very encouraging result for the Global Meteor Network and confirmation of the main objectives that were set when the RMS project was started:

• We recorded unique outbursts.
• The data was collected and reduced in a matter of days.
• The results are consistent with models and previous work.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the folks operating the New Mexico Meteor Array for their hard work and dedication, and Paul Roggemans for editing this article.

 

References

Jenniskens P., Baggaley J., Crumpton I., Aldous P., Pokorny P., Janches D., Gural P. S., Samuels D., Albers J., Howell A., Johannink C., Breukers M., Odeh M., Moskovitz N., Collison J. and Ganjuag S. (2018). “A survey of southern hemisphere meteor showers”. Planetary Space Science, 154, 21–29.

Vida D., Šegon D., Merlak A. (2019). “The overview of the Global Meteor Network project and preliminary results of the 2018 Geminids”. eMetN, 4, 22–24.

Vida D, Gural P., Brown P. G., Campbell-Brown M., Wiegert P. (2019). “Estimating trajectories of meteors: an observational Monte Carlo approach–I. Theory”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 491(2), 2688–2705.

[1] Mikhail Maslov’s predictions : http://feraj.ru/Radiants/Predictions/209p-ids2019eng.html

[2] Global Meteor Network: https://globalmeteornetwork.org/

[3] RMS library on GitHub: https://github.com/CroatianMeteorNetwork/RMS