(meteorobs) Perseids from Switzerland

[Marco Langbroek]

Geert Barentsen wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> Our Belgian youth group gathered around 4044 Perseids in 229h Teff at 
> our astronomy camp in Switzerland.  I generated a ZHR graph tonight 
> using free software (postgresql and gnuplot). Nothing spectacular, but I 
> thought I'd share the result: http://www.urania.be/oberon/per2005e.pdf  
> (PDF graph)
> 
> Greetings,
> Geert

Hi Geert,

Nice graph and nice (and large!) continuous dataset! Well done!

A few of my thoughts after looking at your graph: the ZHR's come out slightly on 
the high side for all nights concerned. This could be due to either not taking 
into account personal perceptions in the reduction, or systematic underestimate 
of the limiting magnitude in the data (the latter often happens with e.g. novice 
observers).

I have been working on a ZHR calculation program lately which might be useful to 
you and others. A first version can be downloaded at:

  http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek/lamasoft.html

It is a DOS console program (sorry, no yet fluent enough in C++ to make a 
windows environment...) which will open a DOS console window when you click the 
.exe. It reads observational data from a .txt file and after a short dialogue 
where you can set parameters, outputs a table to the screen and to a text file 
written to your harddisc. Apart from ZHR values it also outputs the solar 
longitude, radiant altitude etc.

First read the README.txt before you start using it, as this file contains the 
instructions on the input file format, how to operate the program etc.

- Marco  :-)

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Dr Marco Langbroek
Dutch Meteor Society (DMS)

e-mail: meteorites at dmsweb.org
private website http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek
DMS website http://www.dmsweb.org
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