A bright bolide produced by a meteoroid follwing a Jupiter family comet orbit

Abstract

One of the techniques employed by the SPanish Meteor Network (SPMN) to monitor the night sky is based on high-sensitivity CCD video de- vices. These have a limiting magnitude of +3/+4 with- out using any image intensifier. Our meteor network has increased the number of such video stations from 2 in 2006 to 25 in 2011. Nowadays we perform a con- tinuous monitoring of meteor and fireball activity over Spain and neighbouring regions, which is equivalent to an area of about 500.000 km 2 . This expansion is being accompanied by a considerable effort to develop sev- eral software packages to accomplish different tasks, such as the automated operation of some of our sta- tions and the data reduction of the huge amount of information these provide. Besides, favourable weather conditions in Spain combined with the high sensitivity of our systems give us an advantage to per- form this continuous monitoring, which has provided important information about meteor and fireball activ- ity. The analysis of bolides is, in fact, one of our pri- orities, as brighter ones can be potential meteorite pro- ducing events and fireballs also may provide useful information about disruption episodes in their parent objects. In this context, we have imaged on April 27, 2011 a double-station sporadic fireball with an abso- lute magnitude of about -7 ± 1. The analysis of this bo- lide is made here.