(meteorobs) Orionids from Greece

Karl Antier ka.antier at wanadoo.fr
Thu Oct 22 16:42:46 EDT 2009


Thank you Przemyslaw and Chris for your answers,

> It's more than a perceptual phenomenon. Events which can be described by a
> Poisson distribution (which pretty reasonably includes both shower and
> sporadic meteors) exhibit an actual clustering in frequency (this is
> described by noise theory).

Sorry, I must have badly expressed myself.
What I meant by "perceptual phenomenon" is the fact that people feel meteors
appear in clusters, because, I suppose the human brain has a bad tendancy to
try to find links or to group together events that actually appear to be
randomly distributed. I think human brain can just not create random. That's
why we have the tendancy to group meteors in clusters. Even if it's sometimes
justified. As you mentionned, a Poisson distribution shows clustering. but
human brain will mainly recall the meteors that appeared together, not those
which appear alone. That's why I mentionned this "perceptual phenomenon".
But as you explained, I think it's possible that statistical stuffs explain
part of this phenomenon. And if it's not, that will really become interesting!

Thank you both (and others you privately answered) for your help!
Bright Orionids to all,
Karl





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