A new approach to analyse single-site video observations: A Tau Her 2022 case study

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel method for analyzing single-site video observations of meteors, applied to the Tau Her 2022 outburst, providing detailed radiant and population data with improved sensitivity to faint meteors.

Contribution

The paper presents an innovative approach to analyze meteor observations from a single site, enhancing the accuracy of radiant position and population index estimation.

Findings

Detected 626 meteors during Tau Her 2022 outburst

Derived a higher population index of 5.56 ± 1.83

Radiant position consistent with previous studies

Abstract

Here we present a continuation of the work that was based on video observations of the Tau Her 2022 outburst from the McDonald Observatory, Texas, US. On the night of the maximum in 2022 we detected 626 individual Tau Her meteors, for which we estimated photovisual magnitudes and analysed their distribution on the sky to determine the radiant position in an innovative way. The derived population index is $5.56 \pm 1.83$, while the radiant position for the mid-time of the observations is: $\mathrm{RA} = 209.71 ^\circ \pm 1.01 ^\circ$, $\mathrm{Dec} = 27.73 ^\circ \pm 0.07 ^\circ$. Both measurements are in good agreement with other results in the literature, although our population index seems to be higher than most of the published values. We speculate this might be due to the higher sensitivity of our equipment to fainter meteors.