For some years, meteor science has been my passion and i have been talking about it to Astronomy societies whenever possible! I currently have three talks on the subject:
- Meteors: an Observer’s Guide
This is an introductory talk suitable for both astronomy and non-astro groups, in which I cover what meteors and meteorites are, where they come from and why we’re interested in them, and I explain how best to observe them visually and with a camera, from your back garden. Finally, I talk a little about radio and video detection and the work we do in the UK and Global Meteor Networks. - The UK Meteor Network: a Decade of Video Detections
This talk focuses on the UK Meteor Network, better known as UKMON, the world’s largest video camera network by camera count, with around 250 cameras across the whole country. I give a history of the network, how its evolved, and how it works to determine trajectories and orbits of these tiny extraterrestrial objects. I discuss our work as part of the Global Meteor Network in more detail and about some of the discoveries that have been made with the data. - The Science of Meteor Detection
In this lecture I explain how we detect and analyse meteors, so that we can say where they came from, how they formed, and – sometimes! – where they landed. I begin by explaining a bit of the history of the study of meteors – and why meteorology is something different! – before looking at how the early attempts to measure meteor trajectories and work out what they’re made of have evolved into an advanced science which today allows us to identify meteorites from Mars and fireballs that have come from the furthest depths of space. Although this is a mathematical topic, there are no equations in this talk and it is designed to be accessible to everyone.