(meteorobs) Key lessons from the Draconids experience

[Daniel Fischer]

The Draconids outburst of 2011 has broken new ground in several respects, I think:

- For the first time some 'situational awareness' via the web could be achieved
while the outburst was still under way; it were mainly a handful of tweets
mentioning a high rate of meteors that showed - in the minutes before 20 UTC - that
something substantial was going on. Didn't work so well during previous (largely
Perseid) shower nights, perhaps the abundance of smartphones 'in the field' helped.

- The premiere of the automatically generated activity plot from video camera data
was a huge success: the profile on http://www.imonet.org/draconids or rather
http://vmo.imo.net/flx/ (nice GUI!) converged onto the final inverted V shape many
hours faster than did the visual profile on http://www.imo.net/live/draconids2011
(by now the two match quite well).

- What's still lacking is a way to generate reliable ZHR numbers in near-real time,
from either quick visual reports or the video analysis. Did anyone use the app
http://meteorcounter.org/meteorpage/cooke_site.php - and has anything come out of
this or similar efforts?

The goal, IMHO, should be a meta-website where visual, video and radio data (like
those http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~hro/Flash/2011DRA/index.html collects) are
merged in real time and presented to the public in a nice way ...

Daniel

http://skyweek.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/burst-or-bust-live-blog-zu-den-draconiden-2011
= live blog of the Draconids 2011 experience, still carrying on