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Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Lyrid Meteorshower forwardscatter radar timelapse

I've taken the last three days of forwardscatter spectrographs and combined them into a timelapse video of the lyrid meteor shower. What you're seeing is a spectrograph display of the audio output from my forward scatter meteor radar. As meteors travel through the radar's beam they reflect a portion of the signal back causing a "ping" sound on the receiver. This audio if fed into software that generates a spectrogram image. These images are saved to disk 24/7. This is the result. It's about 17 mins long. 
As you watch you'll see lines that scroll up and down through the frame. These are aircraft passing through the radar beam. Meteors appear as small blips of color. Larger meteors appear as a bigger smear in the image. Large aircraft reflections also tend to have a larger fuzzy band above and below the main echo. Satellites passing through the beam appear as sharply diving diagonal lines.
Enjoy the show!

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