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Re: (meteorobs) Thanks for the answers



On Sat, 1 Aug 1998 KevTK@aol.com wrote:

> Well isn't it true that any distance between observers has the meteor path
> looking different?  I think I remember when my last club did  half-a$$ed
> meteor observing that we did a 2 station ( 20km apart (?) ) photograph
> session. The 2 sites were conected via ham-radio and we knew right away when
> we both captured a bright Lyrid in the frame. When the photos were comparedthe
> angles were different. So IMHO I think you would just get a big headache
> trying to decipher which meteors were the same.

Trying to measure meteor heights visually is tricky.  It looks simple
in diagrammatic form in books, but in practice...  Besides making sure
both observers are seeing the same meteor, there is no guarantee that
both see the same start and end points along the path.  It is possible
to determine radiant and orbits from multiple-station photography, cf.
the excellent results of the DMS.  20km sounds like too short a
baseline to me.

For the plotting comparison mentioned earlier, I believe the AKM
experienced visual observers were at the same location, but might have
been separated by some metres to avoid bias.  Lew, I'll try to
remember to locate the WGN articles tomorrow so we can have the facts.

> I forget, but I think there's a limit on how far away each station could be.

The ultimate limit is set by the Earth's curvature and the height of
the meteor layer, but in practice the limit is governed by the desire
to have a high proportion of common events with reasonable accuracy. A
rule of thumb is to aim to have a baseline comparable to the meteor
height.

Malcolm

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