(meteorobs) The Moonlit Perseids

[BRUCE MCCURDY]

I'm a public education guy myself and "get" the outreach angle, but this one just seemed wrong-headed. I have no idea how you could provide a real-time representation of what was going on in the sky without corrupting the process of observation. Recording my obs on a voice recorder while continuously monitoring the sky in the dark is one thing; turning on a screen for a number of seconds while I type a tweet is something else entirely. The idea of experts being available to answer questions during the peak seems bizarre. Both askers and answerers of questions would be better served to actually observe during that time, and do the Q&A thing at another time. I know it's all about instant gratification these days, but that concept doesn't work for all applications. It's antithetical to this one. Bruce*****-----Original Message-----From: dfischer at astro.uni-bonn.deTo: "Meteor science and meteor observing" Sent: 23/08/2011 03:02 PMSubject: RE: Re: (meteorobs) The Moonlit Perseids
 > Speaking of over the top, does anybody know how the tweetfest
> went? I'm a Twitter guy myself, but it's practically in an anti-Universe
> to meteor observing.

Something I tried to explain to the 'MeteorWatch' organizer for years, but
to no avail. As in the past years, the idea generated a lot of noise (like
endless re-tweets of "the peak is coming" messages when it was long gone)
and no real-time representation whatsoever of what was going on in the
sky; if you took the time to browse through hundreds of #meteorwatch
messages, you could find the occasional useful link to some image, though.

Still the effort has been hailed in the past (by astronomy outreach folks,
not meteor observers) as raising awareness of meteor showers and making
people look for meteors or in the sky in general who wouldn't otherwise -
I have no idea whether there are hard numbers to prove that assertion.
Even one dedicated *real* visual observer 'born' this way would be an
achievement - but is there one, just one?

Dan

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