Aircraft Reflection

The background record was generated during a two hour period of exceptionally low activity, during the late afternoon when the ionizing effects of meteor in-fall are further weakened by the Earth's rotational velocity being in the same direction as that of much incoming material. Most of the spikes were produced by sporadic in-fall.

The overlying display is a highly magnified 9 second interval which includes the event group in the two hour display marked by a yellow arrow. The first part appears to be a 3 cycle Fresnel effect (check the IMO link to the left for more information) almost certainly a reflection from an aircraft at a very great distance. The spike immediately to the right of this is from a meteor. Aircraft reflections are characterized by a more or less symmetrical rise and fall-off in event intensity with several smooth undulations as seen here.

The continuous band of background activity is a sum of low level energy arriving by way of ionospheric scattering and the constant rain of meteoric particles too small and too uniformly distributed in time to produce resolvable spikes.

The magnified Subgraph overlay is a vGraph2000 feature.