(meteorobs) RE: Question about radiant drift

Malcolm J. Currie mjc at star.rl.ac.uk
Thu Jun 17 13:45:20 EDT 2004


> > What exactitude is necessary?
> > Sergey
>
> Thanks for replying. I'm not looking for the values, I'm looking for
> the formulas so I can compute them on my own.

Can somebody not write an article in WGN on computing theoretical
radiant drift, or at least describe the contributing factors that cause
deviations from ecliptic longitude 1.0 degree/day?  There again a clear
insight may need 3-d visualisation tools, implying something for the IMO
web site, say to picture varying orbits through a protracted shower like
the Perseids.  Talking of which, the IMO Perseid radiant drifts were
wrong for many years and analysis of positional observations revealed
the track to be somewhat south of the figures in the IMO Calendar,
confirming earlier Russian results.  Rainer Arlt presented this at the
2002 IMC in Poland.

In practice careful observations determine the radiant drift.

Malcolm Currie


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