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Re: (meteorobs) Star Counting
George Zay wrote:
>I think I can safely say that this is not going to be a frequent enough of a
>problem to do anything drastic about. Like bob said... when you reach +7.5
>that's it!
Thanks for the response, George. You're right of course: I doubt I'll be getting
down to the Keys more than once or twice a year, if I'm lucky. :< Still, from
the star counts I got during Perseid max this year, using 7.5 as an (arbitrary)
cutoff IS putting a fair slant in my data from that night! (Turns out the Taurus
field was not the only one with high counts - as you'd expect...)
Also, it's hard to imagine other observers (especially those lucky folks in
Australia & Oceania) don't sometimes have the same problem. After all, the Keys
are dark, but they aren't the end of the Earth! Of course not all of us are
cursed with living in overpopulated, light- and air-polluted regions like New
England, Europe, or California either... :< Oh well, I guess time will tell!
Coincidentally, Marco Langbroek mentioned in a private email that really high
limiting magnitudes (>7.5) are actually hard to correct for in the standard IMO
ZHR model. The correction factor gets large enough that big errors start to be
introduced! I asked Marco if there was any work in progress to make the model
handle such observations more robustly, but I haven't heard back from him yet.
By the way, just for my own edification, didn't someone actually suggest using
the AAVSO Atlas, rather than saying "when you reach +7.5 that's it"? Just asking
since it could WELL be my reading skills aren't what they once were.
Clear and peaceful skies,
Lew
PS to Bill Tschumy: Did you ever get a response to your questions about the LM
charts, Bill? You raised some interesting points, by the way!
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