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Re: (meteorobs) meteor duration estimates
Meteor durations can only be judged by how they appeared. This is the sense
of short intervals that you only develop through practice. I trained by
visualizing meteors while watching a second hand on a watch. Jim's
technique sounds good, too. George, Jim didn't mean using the stopwatch in
actual timings, just developing his sense of timing.
It took me three years to get the durations stabilized. My first efforts
gave Perseid meteors all 1 to 2 seconds, obviously grossly overestimated.
(Ever notice how the public gives fireball timings a factor of 3 to 10 times
too large?) As time passed my timings gradually decreased.
The most numerous timing for me is 0.3s, with a fair number more at 0.2s. I
have very few as fast as 0.1s, and it's impossible for these to go more than
a few degrees.
This reminds me of a little experiment I did in 1980 on a friend's (Ed)
TRS-80. I wrote a short program to plot 20 graphics blocks at random
locations, then clear the screen and do it again, repeatedly. Also, I
included a key to press and stop the display. The cycle was running in
about 0.8s, which works out to 0.04s/block. The challenge was to stare at
the screen, get a mental rhythm going, then stop the display when no blocks
were showing. I had little trouble accomplishing this; Ed got it once after
a few trials. His wife is very uncoordinated; by the time she decided to
hit the key, the screen was almost full of blocks again. Next, I announced,
"Now I'm going to stop it with 5 blocks showing." I succeeding on the first
try, and Ed nearly dropped his teeth. This could be a useful technique for
time training.
Norman
Fort Myers, Florida
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