Luminosity function of faint sporadic meteors measured with a wide-field CMOS mosaic camera Tomo-e PM

Abstract Imaging observations of faint meteors were carried out on April 11 and 14, 2016 with a wide-field CMOS mosaic camera, Tomo-e PM, mounted on the 105-cm Schmidt telescope at Kiso Observatory, the University of Tokyo. Tomo-e PM, which is a prototype model of Tomo-e Gozen, can monitor a sky of ∼ 1.98 deg 2 at 2 Hz. The numbers of detected meteors are 1514 and 706 on April 11 and 14, respectively. The detected meteors are attributed to sporadic meteors. Their absolute magnitudes range from + 4 to + 10 mag in the V -band, corresponding to about 8.3 × 10 − 2 to 3.3 × 10 − 4 g in mass. The present magnitude distributions we obtained are well explained by a single power-law luminosity function with a slope parameter r = 3.1 ± 0.4 and a meteor rate log 10 N 0 = − 5.5 ± 0.5 . The results demonstrate a high performance of telescopic observations with a wide-field video camera to constrain the luminosity function of faint meteors. The performance of Tomo-e Gozenis about two times higher than that of Tomo-e PM. A survey with Tomo-e Gozenwill provide a more robust measurement of the luminosity function.