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(meteorobs) Re: meteorobs-digest V3 #72
Hi all!
Please bear with me. My first post...
Ref: the Iridiums. I agree with those who find them somewhat interesting.
Since they only show up during late twilight, and you have to be situated
perfectly to get a -8 or -9 "flash", they're not much of a nuisance. My gut
feeling is that the money used to create such a technological wonder (a
network of communication sats) won't be allowed to go to waste. Having the
ability to cell phone from anywhere in the world is a desireable objective.
They just need to get the phones themselves to be A: smaller and B: cheaper.
The system will then get enough subscribers to pay for itself. I find
airplanes to be the greater pain in the butt!
Ref: the use of CCD low light video cams for meteor observing. I was
thinking what would really be cool would be the ability to feed the image to
a computer that would "freeze" the track of any meteor as a"trail". Thusly,
you could collect meteor trails on screen permitting greater and more
accurate data acquisition such as; counting, magnitude estimates, train
data, radiant determinations, etc. As I read the posts, what strikes me is
the highly subjective nature of meteor observing. Something like this might
help quantify observations, leading to better science.
I'm not a software author or tech wiz, so all this is just wishful
thinking...
terry
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