(meteorobs) Post having trouble getting though

[meteors at eclipse.net]

Hi floks, for some reason, Chris has not been able to get this message
posted, so I thought I'd post it, assuming mine gets through

Elf Wayne::

===============================
Crid said:


I came up with an interesting idea taking advantage of four
  technologies:

  1. Laptops for recording meteor observations. Nothing new here;
  people have been doing this for years.
  2. Laptop time synchronization with web-based time standards. This is
  now standard on all laptops.
  3. Using the web for coordinating the observations of lots of
  observers. Again, nothing terribly new here.
  4. Java as a standard language that runs on all platforms.

  When you put these four ideas together, you get something
  interesting: what if lots of people downloaded the same program and
  used it to record meteor observations, all time-synched, and then
  emailed the observation log file to a central location, where they
  were all processed as a huge statistical database?

  Done properly, this could be used to form a 3-D map of a meteor
  shower (latitude, longitude, and time). With just a little more
  effort, we could get a 3D image of the meteor stream that intersected
  with the earth.

  As far as I know (please somebody, tell me if I have re-invented an
  old wheel), this hasn't been done before. While it would be
  interesting to do this with the Perseids next month, the really
  exciting possibility is the Aurigid outburst. Although viewing the
  outburst is limited to the West Coast of the USA, this outburst has
  several aspects that make possible something really big: it's on a
  Saturday morning on the last long weekend of the summer, meaning that
  lots of people will be dispersed into the mountains. With some proper
  Web PR (and I have some connections for getting the ball rolling), we
  could get THOUSANDS of people contributing. Wouldn't that be peachy-
  keen?

  I have already written a first draft of the program and designed most
  of the software. You can find a more detailed description of this
  idea at:

  http://www.erasmatazz.com/Leonids/WebMeteor/Aurigid.html

  There's still lots of work to be done, and if anybody wants to chip
  in, I could use the help. And of course, I'll need observers for the
  dress rehearsal with the Perseids.

  I tried subscribing to this mailing list through the website, but
  nothing seems to have happened, so please respond directly to me at
  the email address provided at the URL above.

  Chris Crawford

  ************************************************************************
  *************

  Any help you could offer me in getting this spread around among the
  meteor observation community would be much appreciated.

  BTW, what is the conventional wisdom on Peter Jennisken's predicted
  Aurigid outburst?

  Chris Crawford