(meteorobs) A Visual Observing Question

[Shy Halatzi]

Of course. If there is a shower and not many people are observing it, your observation records might be precious, regardless of the lm. We had instances in which our meteor group was more or less the only one in the world making observations.
Naturally, an observation with a better lm will be more useful since it has more meteors. But it doesn't mean that low lm observations are meaningless. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On 28 בדצמ 2013, at 02:02, pzeller1966 <pzeller1966 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>   I have a question that I've been meaning to throw out to members of this mailing list. First, to give a little background, I've gotten more and more interested lately in making scientifically valuable visual observations of meteor showers; both major and minor showers. I've been reading about the methods used by the IMO for meteor counts and plotting. However, while reading through the material available online, I was a little disappointed to find out that visual observing is discouraged if the limiting magnitude of the sky is 5.0 or less. Years of amateur astronomy have taught me that my most transparent skies from my back yard let me see stars as low as 4.5 - 4.8 magnitude with the naked eye. I can very rarely see stars to 5.0 and my very best, darkest nights have let me see stars to 5.2 magnitude. However, nights like this are very rare! I've thought about trying to find a better observing site further from the city lights, but this doesn't help if the night has moonlight. I guess my question is this ... Can any useful visual observing be done on nights when the limiting visual magnitude is 4.0 - 4.5 or so? Useful enough to report to the IMO or other groups like NAMN? All replies are welcome. 
> 
>   Thanks and good observing to all of you.
> 
>   Paul Z.
>   Indianapolis IN USA
> 
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