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Re: (meteorobs) Sporadics and wavelets

[Look out meteorobs lurkers - this is a dense one! :>]

Thanks for a great, detailed response, John! I'd also be interested to hear
responses from folks most familiar with analyzing IMO visual and
photographic data: do they believe the current IMO methods generate useful
input for discrete Fourier or phase-space analysis, wavefield
decomposition, etc?

At 10:01 AM 5/14/97 -0400, Lew Gramer wrote:
>I believe much of the software that you need is available on the S&T
>a quickbasic compiler

I appreciate the suggestion! But I'm not sure that even meteor science
would incite me to ever program in QuickBasic again... :> Actually I'm
genuinely sorry about THAT decision by the software-savvy folks of S&T.

>The more precisely the time is measured, the better the opportuniy to
>spot minor showers.  For analyzing sporadics, I suspect knowing the time
>+/- 24 hrs would be adequate to show general trends.

I guess a day would be sufficient granularity, so long as you were dealing
with data that was appropriately corrected for diurnal variation and
radiant height. But doesn't this bring up another problem? - I wonder how
you can do radiant height correction for "radiantless" meteors, not to
mention meteors from unknown minor radiants? And without that correction,
isn't it too easy to bias analysis with geographic- and time-local data?

So it seems like you actually have to do analysis with hour- or even
minute-granularity, and decompose these cycles out, no? As I understood it
from Dr. Meisel, he was interested not only in spotting short-term "pulses"
(i.e., individual minor showers), but also longer-lasting signals (e.g.,
seasonal and subseasonal variations - effects which presumably might relate
to solar system motion, orbital resonances, etc!) Hm... :)

>Radio detection with computer recording of data
>could generate enough data to analyze on a site
>by site basis, and then correlate data among sites
>in case any site suffered from loss of sensitivity etc.

This is quite close to Dr. Meisel's view, I suspect, and seems one of the
main reasons why his efforts have focused so much on radio observing in
recent years - some would say to the detriment of AMS's other programs. I
guess I just keep hoping us humble visual (and maybe telescopic and photo)
observers might also be able to contribute data to this intriguing research...

Whew! Here's hoping I get some observing in soon, for the list's sake! :>
Lew
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