(meteorobs) Why don't more amateurs get it? (Meteors, that is.)

[Wes Stone]

Lew,

My experience is that MANY in the general public are interested in meteors 
and meteor showers. I put up an annual web page dedicated to the major 
meteor showers: http://skytour.homestead.com/met2007.html

I get quite a few emails from people wanting clarification on peak times and 
optimum viewing direction. Most or all would not consider themselves amateur 
astronomers, but they are willing to go out and spend an hour or two under 
the night sky (sometimes for fairly pitiful returns) and many of them have 
past memories of an impressive meteor shower. Locally, we had 165 persons 
attend a fairly poorly-advertised Perseid party in a rural area with no 
formal astronomy club. If these newcomers are turned off, it's either 
because of unrealistic expectations, light-polluted skies, news media hype 
(everything that's advertised has to be incredible or extraordinary instead 
of just a normal display that happens every year), or some such.

In my old urban-based astronomy club, things are a bit different. At least 
one member has expressed outright disdain for meteor observing, but even the 
ones who will go out for the major showers do so on a strictly casual basis. 
I know of one other member who does formal observing, but I'm not even sure 
he's a member of the club any more. Occasionally, I can press someone to 
fill out a fireball report. The Aurigids seem to have been an 
aberration--lots of club members were out on a Saturday morning to see what 
they could see, even if it wasn't much from city skies. So I'd say that most 
astronomy club members have a lot more experience with telescopes than the 
average citizen, but the same is not true regarding meteors.

Even though I don't have the technical expertise, I'd really like to see 
video meteor observations catch on on a large scale. I think that multiple 
station observations and hybrid video/visual observations could really be 
useful in filling in our picture of the meteor year. I think most clubs have 
some technically-inclined members who might be interested in cooking up a 
system and hooking it in with the video observation network.

As far as visual observation, I think most people will continue to do it 
just for fun. At the aforementioned Perseid party, one of the organizers 
mentioned doing a count, and I started describing how I collect data. I was 
pretty quickly shouted down, saying that that would take all the fun out of 
an annual tradition. So, how it's supposed to work is they count from 
midnight to three a.m., and whenever someone sees a meteor they shout out 
the next number in the count! Although useless for standardized data, it is 
admittedly quite a bit of fun. I even participated during a break between 
formal count intervals. I think they had between three and ten people 
"counting" and got just shy of 400 meteors in the three hours.

Just a few ramblings...

--
Wes Stone
Chiloquin, OR
http://skytour.homestead.com