[meteorite-list] Different colors of meteors/shooting stars

[Doug Ross]

Thank you for the explanation, Chris. I have often wondered about this, since various colors often seem to be reported by different witnesses to the same meteor event. Wouldn't atmospheric filtering also affect the perceived color, depending on the angle and distance from which a meteor is viewed? In much the same way as the sun's color appears to change at sunset or sunrise.

Doug Ross
doug at dougross.net


> Hi Jim-
> 
> As a rule, you can't tell much about a meteor's composition from the 
> visual colors observed. The eye is a lousy spectrometer!
> 
> The optical output of a meteor consists of hundreds of component 
> emission lines, possibly a blackbody component in some cases, and some 
> strong atmospheric emission lines. The visual effect is something close 
> to white, sometimes with a color cast provided mainly by atmospheric 
> ionization. While there are a handful of strong emission lines commonly 
> observed in spectra, these are very narrow and therefore represent only 
> a small part of the total luminous energy, which means they don't have 
> much effect on the color ("color" being a physiological phenomenon, not 
> a physical one).
> 
> This isn't to say there might not be some cases where meteoroid 
> composition is reflected in the color, but you can't make any 
> generalizations.
> 
> Chris
> 
> *******************************
> Chris L Peterson
> Cloudbait Observatory
> http://www.cloudbait.com