A meteor question for Wayne

[andrew_t1000]

The last few nights have been pleasantly warm so I've been out observing most of the night.
I keep seeing very short, fast, but quite faint meteors around the south celestial pole.
Last night I saw about 4 in 5 hours, tonight I've seen 6 or so far in less than 3 hours.

I'm trying to get my head around where they might be originating from.
What I'm going to loosely call the "radiant" is kinda just south east of the SCP and they are radiating out from that point in no particular direction.

Is it possible these are little bits of nickel-iron getting "funnelled" down the Earths magnetic field lines?

How can bits of space dust and rock be coming in what looks like a parallel trajectory to the Earths axis?
Is this some kind of optical illusion?

The seeing is great tonight! The Megallenic Clouds look amazing!
And the Milky Way looks almost 3D!

I'm going to load up some 1600ASA film and try a time lapse of the SCP, see if I can photograph some of these "mystery" streaker meteors, I don't know if I will get an image though, they are very faint, but if you don't try, you'll never know!

 

[yevaud]

Huh, for once I get to beat him to the answer.

That'd be the Normids, active from February 22 - March 22. Coincidentally, the peak was last evening, the 14th. These are usually very faint, and are difficult to detect above the background sporadic rate.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Pretty good choice Yev. The only other active shower is the antihelion radiant (currently in Virgo) nowhere near the SCP.

 

[weeman]

Where do you live, andrew?

 

[andrew_t1000]

In South Australia, 30km outside Adelaide, near a town called Echunga.
Google Echunga or Jupiter Creek.
Look @
http://www.youtube.com/user/cyberteque
or
http://www.myspace.com/andrew_t1000

I have lots of photographs of the local plants and other stuff on MySpace and YouTube.

 

[weeman]

Ah, so you must have quite a night sky down there! Mine is so-so here. I live away from the city but still residential. I'd say the most amazing sky I've seen to date was on the big island of Hawaii.