(meteorobs) Introduction

[chrisc at storytron.com]

Hi all, I'm Chris Crawford, the fellow who proposed the idea for
coordinated laptop observing.

I have watched the Perseids every single year since 1964 (although I
confess that a number of times I dragged myself outside, watched for a few
minutes until I saw a Perseid, then went back to bed.) My specialty is
kooky ideas for observing meteors. In 1972, for the Geminids, I set up a
truly wild and crazy scheme for (supposedly) monitoring the attention of
the observer. I worked long and hard on the old "are shower meteors
nonrandom?" hypothesis, never coming up with anything to support the
hypothesis. For the 1999 Leonids I designed a system to combine the
observations of multiple observers at a single site. Dr. Peter Jenniskens
asked me to modify it for use on the 1999 Leonid MAC mission, which earned
me a seat on that mission. I saw more meteors in a few hours there than I
had seen in my entire life.

I've built a system for Peter for digitizing the old analog videotapes
recorded during that storm, breaking them into frames, and storing the
frames in a usable order on a hard drive that he'll be putting onto the
net. Once all that work is done, I'll set to work with the images, writing
software optimized for Leonid detection and analysis. Maybe I'll actually
get some definitive results on the nonrandom hypothesis!

This new laptop scheme of mine is yet another kooky idea. It could really
take off -- with the right publicity, we could get thousands of reports,
which really would make it possible to get a 3D map of a section of the
stream. We'll do our dress rehearsal with the Perseids and the big shot
with the Aurigids.