listen to the mirrors streaking overhead

 

 I've seen it rainin' fire in the sky

 

Ah the Perseids - My favorite meteor shower.  The peak falls somewhere on the 11^th or 12^th of August.  That usually means you can be out all night without a jacket.  If you're in a very dark area on a moonless night sometimes you'll see two hundred in an hour.

 

Comets are the Pig Pens of the Solar System.  Not enough mas for gravity to form into anything solid and spherical, the stuff they're made of tends to boil away as they heat up.  Warm one enough and it's dust trail thickens enough to form a tail or two .  The Tuttle-Swift comet is youthful enough to be extra dusty and the Perseid shower is just the Earth passing through it's dust path.

 

A bright moon marred this year's shower..  even in the mountains counting forty probably required exceptional eyes.  I'm happy with a few, but the sky was cloudy.  Time for Plan B.  I'd listen to them. 

 

Perseid meteors are tiny little things - usually about the size of a grain of sand - that are booking along at about 59,000 meters per second (132,000 miles per hour) when they hit the atmosphere.  They're gone in a flash, but the friction heats them up so much that they ionize - their atoms losing an electron or two. This ionized plasma trail is electrically conductive and makes a dandy radio reflector.

 

The trick is to aim an antenna at VHF or higher frequency station just over the horizon.  The signal won’t make it to you unless, say a reflector just happened to show up somewhere between you and the station.

 

 

I started listening to meteors as a kid in Montana.  At the time Great Falls only had two FM stations.  Edmonton had several including one that was well separated in frequency from anything in Lethbridge or Calgary. I’d point a directional antenna Northish towards Edmonton their frequency and wait.  You'd hear bursts of Canadian radio from one to ten seconds long.    It was clear why I never dated in high school.    

  

 

I still listen to the trails on cloudy nights.    Last night a highly directional antenna was pointed towards a very powerful 61.26 MHz transmitter in Timmins, Ontario (CITO).  The plot on the top is frequency (horizontal) with signal strength in decibels (vertical)  Under it is a scrolling time-stamped “waterfall” plot with frequency along the horizontal axis and color coding for signal strength.  The first meteor trail  was about six seconds long and dab smack at 61.260 MHz  - Timmons coming in via a Perseid!  

 

The plot just under it is a much larger meteor that left a trail lasting over over two minutes. (visually something like this could last as long as twenty seconds)  It was large enough that a bit of it may have made it to the ground.  It would have been bright - undoubtedly brighter than any star or planet. 

 

 

The idea of using mirrors in the sky to communicate isn't new.²  In the early days of satellites it was thought active communication satellites might not be good enough for video and other large bandwidth applications.  Echo was a passive communication satellite.  A metalized balloon about a hundred feet in diameter orbiting about a thousand miles up.  I remember watching it as a kid - it's large reflective surface made it a very bright object in the evening sky.  

 

 

Microwaves were bounced off Echo -- the idea being to have a series or regularly spaced balloons in orbit to allow continuous communication.  As with any technology there were some interesting problems and it wasn't a surprise that Bell Labs was involved with an interesting ground station at Crawford Hill in Holmdel, New Jersey.  

 

for the history of technology buffs  here's an old film on Project Echo

 

 

 

After the Echo program a couple of Bell Labs radio astronomers were using the antenna to  investigate some stubborn radio noise that just wouldn't go away.  They'd point the antenna anywhere in the sky, but wherever they went, there it was.  They double-checked all of their equipment including removing a layer of white organic dielectric material in the twenty foot horn antenna (bird poop). The signal's wavelength corresponded to the microwave spectrum a blackbody would give about three degrees Kelvin -- just above absolute zero.  Only one explanation was plausible.   It turned out to be a cosmic background radiation.  A microwave radiation that is everywhere - the detectable remnant of the Big Bang.  Penzais and Wilson received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.   A surplus antenna helped change our view of the Universe.

 

 

I continued watching Perseids for five hours.  It  maxed out at about 60 an hour - more than I would have seen visually without the clouds .  Not close to my record, but that's another story.  

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¹ You can figure out their composition by studying the spectrum of their final light.  Meteorites are those large enough to survive the trip to the Earth.  They are usually at least a few grams at first.  

 

² I won't go into meteor scatter communications, but it's been used in trucking and remote sensing.

 

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Recipe corner

 

Tomatoes are finally great!  I've noted this one before, but it's a keeper and someone just requested it again

 

Simple Summer Pasta and Tomatoes

Some time ago I had a very simple tomato and pasta dish. The tomatoes were
in chucks and not really cooked. It would only work if they were perfect so
I gave it a try. Here is about what I did. This would be enough for two
hungry people or four people if served as a side course. 

Two really amazingly blimpishly ripe tomatoes that are going to have great
flavor. I would go with an heirloom tomato as the new ones have so much
goodness bred out of them. My guess is I had maybe about one and a half
pounds of tomato. Chop these into half inch pieces and scape them into a
big enough bowl (how is that for precision?) be sure and get some of the
juice that is sitting on the cutting board.

Pour some good extra virgin olive oil on them. Maybe two glugs (another quality
measurement). Put a good amount of a good finishing salt (Malden is great) and freshly ground pepper on them stirring to mix. Let them sit.

Start some water boiling for the pasta and throw some salt in. Cheap salt
of course

Now chop a strong red onion or some scallions into slivers. Maybe about a
quarter cup

Chop a handful of good arugula

Cook about a half pound of pasta and try to stay away from the marinating
tomatoes

Place the onions on top of the tomatoes spreading them out, then make a layer
of arugula choppings

Now dump the pasta on top of the layered mixture in the bowl and leave it
for a two or three minutes. To deal with the frustration grate some good
cheese for a topping and top it. (I prefer it without cheese, but most people probably want it). The heat from the pasta is slightly cooking the ingredients beneath,  just barely, but perfectly enough. 

Now mix it all up and serve.