Current Trends in Meteor Spectroscopy

Abstract

A detailed summary of the progress of meteor spectroscopy over more than a century has been published recently (Millman 1980), and only a few historical facts will be noted here. Serious research in this field was initiated by Alexander Stewart Herschel, a grandson of Sir William Herschel, in 1863 (Herschel 1865). Originally, the observational data were entirely visual records but, in the first decade of the twentieth century, a brief program for the photography of meteor spectra was carried out at the Moscow Observatory by S. Blajko (1907). Interest in this type of observation developed slowly and further programs were not attempted until the thirties. At the outbreak of World War II some 60 meteor spectra had been photographed. In the post-war period a general interest in the upper atmosphere led to the development of more efficient meteor cameras which employed replica gratings, and later electronic image-intensification systems recording on video tape (Hemenway et al. 1971; Clifton et al. 1979). As a result several thousand meteor spectra are now available for study.