(meteorobs) real-time Draconid flux display

[sirko at molau.de]

Dear friends,

members of the IMO Video Meteor Network will try a unique experiment to 
provide you with a REAL real-time Draconid flux display. In the next few 
days, you can check for the current Draconid activity at

http://www.imonet.org/draconids/

without a delay of hours or days. Up to 20 cameras based in central 
europe will try to upstream their observations, and the flux graph given 
above will be updated every two minutes. If you leave the browser window 
open, it will automatically refresh every five minutes.

Note, that this is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL, and there are many reasons why 
the experiment may fail:

* most cameras are expecting poor weather, as the favourite weather 
conditions we experienced in the last two weeks in Central Europe, are 
over just in time :(

* the data are uploaded automatically as is (i.e. there is no manual 
quality check) and the observing conditions are complicated with moonlit 
skies. So a single camera that runs "mad" may waste the whole flux display

* the chosen parameter set may be suboptimal for the (unknown) Draconid 
activity. Maybe there is too much averaging, maybe the graph has too 
high resolution and shows strong scatter?

* the current VMO infrastructure is not intended to serve frequent web 
accesses. We try to circumvent the problem by caching the graphs at the 
above URL, but we have no idea whether this will really work out or 
whether the whole systems crashed because of high load.

As we will try to observe the Draconids ourselve, there is no one who 
will have a look at the system and fix any problem that may occur

Even given all these imponderables we believe the Draconids are worth a 
trial, and want to offer you this service. At least, we hope to gain 
experience with such a real-time flux monitor for future compaigns.

Knock on wood!
Sirko

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*   Sirko Molau                 *                          *
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