I doubt you were seeing micrometeorites, and almost certainly not
Orionid micrometeorites. While there is iron in Halley's dust trail, it
remains a trace constituent. Orionid micrometeorites should be
silicates, not iron particles.
You don't state the size of particles observed, but typical
micrometeorites are in the 1-10 um diameter range. These particles
require months or even years to settle to the ground. Even huge
micrometeorites- 100 um diameter- would require about 100 hours to reach
the ground, so you wouldn't see them until days after the shower peak.
I've recovered particles very much like what you describe (using a
custom built micrometeorite collection device), and have subjected the
most interesting to examination under an electron microscope (with
dispersion analysis). All proved to be nothing more than industrial
smokestack debris- and I'm high in the Rockies where the air has a very
low particulate count. Where you live, I doubt you'd ever pick out
micrometeorites from the vast array of industrial pollutants.
Chris
*******************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com
On 10/22/2012 9:07 AM, b1dunov...@aol.com wrote:
Hello Listees. I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend.
I live in the Chicago suburbs and was not able to view the Orionoid
meteor shower due to overcast skys and horrible light polution from the
city. Knowing this would be the case, Two weeks ago while cleaning the
gutters on the house I rinsed the entire roof off several times so that
the amount of shingle material left in the gutter was less and less each
rinse, until finally there was hardly anything coming off. Yesterday I
affixed a fine screen to the end of my drain shoots and collected all
the material that I was rinsing off. I soaked all the material in
anhydrous alcohol for several hours and dried then dried in silica gel.
What I had was a mix of different shigle materials, tiny twigs and
hopefully something of interest.
I use a rare earth magnet to seperate the material into a pile of
magnetic and a pile of non-magnetic materials. The magnetic material was
them put in a petri dish and was sorted throught under high
magnification for hours removing small magnetic materials in the rough
shingle grit. After working all day doing this seperation i was left
with stuff that left me with my jaw dropped.
What i was looking at were aerodynamiclly shaped black metalic pieces,
some perfectly round, some pancake shaped, some bars, a couple buttons
with rollover all around such as you would see in some indochinites, and
even severl tear-dropped pieces with unbroke tails. Under even higher
magnification you could see surface details and even multple skins on
some of the tear drops and bb's. Along with them there were also bb's
that looked slightly oxidized and were an orange color I assume were
missed during the initial roof rinses, however the the mass majority
were shiny black and had very fine sufrface detail under magnification.
Is there a chance these are condensents of vaporized material from the
Orionoid shower? If not why such the high concentrations of unoxidized
aeroforms so dilicate I doubt would still have such perfect tails after
my rigourous rinsing ahead of the meteor shower.
Email me off list if your interested in pictures of what I've described
above. I would love to hear some feedback from the community! I should
have some pictures up for the masses to view shortly.
Regards,
Brandon D.
IMCA# 9312
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