(meteorobs) perseid spatial project

[perseid]

I'm putting together something that's never been done before: a spatial analysis of the Perseid meteor stream. We've had plenty of temporal analyses, but nobody has ever been able to get data over a wide area -- because observations have always been localized to single observers. But what if we had hundreds or thousands of people all over North America and Europe observing Perseids and somebody collected and collated all their observations? This is crowd-sourcing applied to meteor astronomy. I've been working for some time on putting together just such a scheme. I've got a cute little Java applet that you can use on your laptop to record the times of fall of meteors you see, the spherical trig for analyzing the geometry (oh my aching head!) and a statistical scheme that I *think* will reveal the spatial patterns we're most likely to see -- IF such patterns exist. I've also got some web pages describing the whole shebang. They start here:

http://www.erasmatazz.com/page78/page128/PerseidProject/PerseidProject.html

I think I've gotten all the technical, scientific, and mathematical problems solved, but there remains the big one: publicizing it. I'd much appreciate it if readers here participated in the project and recruited others to participate.

Thanks for any help you can find time to offer.

Chris Crawford