July is a good month for meteor observers in Poland. Polish observers
associated in Comets and Meteors Workshop (CMW) are mostly young people
studying at secondary schools or universities. July is the first month
of summer holidays. The warm nights, a lot of free time, good weather
conditions strongly encourage to observations. Finally about of
whole year observations made by CMW members are collected in July and
August.
All above facts and rapidly growing interest in meteor observations in
Poland during the last few years allowed us to investigate the activity of the
stream called -Cygnids or o-Cygnids. Each July in years
1995-1997 many meteor observers watched the sky using visual, telescopic
and photographic techniques. In order to obtain most reliable
results we had to remove observations made incorrectly or in poor
conditions. Using our standard methods (Olech & Wozniak 1996;
Olech
1997) we required that:
mean limiting magnitude (LM) in the field of view
should be at least 5.0 mag,
cloud coverage correction factor F should be
smaller than 1.7,
the radiant of the stream should be above
over the horizon (in Polish latitudes during whole July this condition is always
satisfied),
the center of the field of view should be at an altitude
higher than
.
Finally we obtained of effective time of visual observations. During
this time a group of 35 CMW members noted 757 possible meteors from
-Cygnid stream and 4569 sporadic meteors. More detailed
statistics with names of CMW observers is given in Table 1.
Telescopic observations present a very useful tool for meteor investigators. Meteors are very often plotted with a larger accuracy than in case of visual observations. It gives the possibility to study the structure and drift of the radiant. We also obtain information about magnitude distribution for fainter events. The main problem with telescopic observations is that this kind of watching meteors requires good equipment (preferably binoculars with a large field of view mounted on tripod), experienced observers and a lot of patience.
Fortunately July is usually the time in which we organize
an Astronomical Camp of CMW, which
takes place at the Observational Station of Warsaw University Observatory in
Ostrowik. The number of participants is always around 15, so we organize
two four persons groups observing visually, one or two persons working with a few
cameras pointed at different directions, and three-four persons
observing telescopically different fields located from the
supposed radiant
of
-Cygnids. We used mostly
,
and
binoculars and Russian AT-1 refractors
(
, field of view as large as
). For plotting meteors
we use A-type maps of International Meteor Organization (IMO) or
Uranometria 2000.0 charts. Of course other observers which do not
participate in the camp observe
-Cygnids both visually and
telescopically at their locations.
Finally 14, our observers obtained of telescopic observations with 234
meteors detected. The number of possible
-Cygnids is equal to 41. Table 2
summarizes our telescopic observations.
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