(meteorobs) Next meteor shower and call for observation ofcomet 209P

[grs_longs at Safe-mail.net]

Mikhail responded :-

>> I surmise the expected future outburst is based on proximity of the comet rather than anything else?

>Not so. It is based on computaion of 209p dust trails orbital
evolution. There are many examples when seemingly favorable comet
returns was accopmained by very modest activity of their meteor
showers.

Thanks for that, now you mention it, it is obvious in hindsight from your graphs etc on your webpage.

With respect to the "classical" meteor databases, they are quite sparse and very seasonal and very gappy, so they're really only good when they show half a dozen or so candidates as positive detections, negative detections can be null data more than anything.  Some precision problems also occur, the radio meteors have radiants to only the nearest degree, for instance, with knock on effects for orbits.  And SonotaCo barely goes below mag 2.  Maybe, with any luck, after a decade or so we'll have a massive public CAMS orbit repository/server, you never know.

Cheers

John