(meteorobs) Update of the IMO visual report form

[Chris Peterson]

The entire form strikes me as rather confusing. Dates and times are 
mixed, and formats aren't particularly well chosen.

The question I have is: who is your audience for this page? It seems to 
me that nobody but a serious observer is going to fill the thing out. I 
have to think such a person is capable of entering the proper UT for an 
observation (especially with a note on the form for reminder).

I have to deal with date errors on my fireball report form, but that is 
filled in by casual, chance observers with little or no observation 
experience. Surely the IMO form has a different audience.

It would seem sufficient to simply ask for the starting and ending UTs 
(please, use yyyy-mm-dd hhmm notation- anything else encourages errors), 
and then just hhmm-hhmm for individual observations.

It's a bit more work, but if I were making this form I'd add a little 
scripting. I think the observed showers should be selected from a 
dropdown so that they are guaranteed to be valid, and then those codes 
filled in on the observation report before it gets filled in. That is, 
the report becomes a two-step operation: first, the basic information is 
entered along with the observed showers. This is submitted (with some 
error checking), which produces a second page presenting the actual 
report form.

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Geert Barentsen" <geert at barentsen.be>
To: <imo-news at yahoogroups.com>; <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 2:37 PM
Subject: (meteorobs) Update of the IMO visual report form


> Dear meteor observers,
>
> An additional field has been added to the header of the online visual 
> report
> form at the IMO website. You are now asked to specify the night of the
> observation as a consecutive pair of local dates. For example, tonight 
> would
> be specified as "26/27-11-2007", no matter if your observation started
> before or after midnight Universal Time. This field has been added to
> prevent mistakes in the reported "starting date" of the observation.
>
> As always, feedback is very welcome!
>
> http://www.imo.net/visual/report/electronic
>
> Good luck observing!
> Geert Barentsen