(meteorobs) The value of visual meteor observations

[Rainer Arlt]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 12:46:31PM -0700, Chris Crawford wrote:
(replying to Siddartha)

> This can be a controversial subject. Visual observations were at one  
> time not long ago the core of meteor astronomy. However, the advent  
> of video meteor observations has created a challenge to the primacy  
> of visual observations. Video observations are more reliable and more  
> consistent than human observations; however, they are still rare and  
> in many cases are not as sensitive as human observers. There is no  
> doubt that human observations still retain value. There is lots of  
> room for furious argument about how quickly video observations will  
> render human observations useless.

I fully agree with Chris' comments. What has actually turned out to
be fairly difficult to utilize, is the visual observations away from
major showers' maxima. Meteors can be plotted and shower accuracy
is then fairly good, but the digitization of all these plots is
very time consuming and is done only for a fraction of the data
being recorded. I have about 5 meters of folders in my book shelves
with data for which the sumamry data (shower meteors per obs. period;
magnitude distributions) are available from the Visual Meteor Data
Base (VMDB), but the individual plots are not, digitally. It would
be a great project for sombody solely devoted to minor shower analysis
to obtain all the meteor coordinates.  -- Principally, visual meteor
observations still have a lot of potential, no doubt during major
shower maxima, but the utilization of minor-shower observations has
turned out to be tedious.

Remember that meteor observations are collected world-wide at
http://www.imo.net/visual/report/ , preferably with the electronic
form presented there, or by simple text report as an email to me.
We hope to set up a live-graph of the Perseid activity as it was 
done for some other showers recently. The setup is maintained by
Geert Barentsen, and he showed at the last IMC, how close the auto-
matic activity graph routine is to a final analysis with manual
interference. It's also fun seeing the graph grow! We are looking 
forward to your input for the coming showers.


Best wishes,
Rainer



-- 
Rainer Arlt  --  Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam -- www.aip.de
rarlt at aip.de --  phone: +49-331-7499-354  --  fax: +49-331-7499-526