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Re: (meteorobs) Zenith Attraction, some numbers
George wrote:
>Actually, I was looking for any large shifts that would be listed
>amongst IMO's working list of showers. These showers were listed
>by IMO as those that have activity high enough to make observing
>efforts worthwhile to retrieve usable scientific data from.
This is not what I understood the purpose of the IMO Working List
to be. I understood from (official) IMO representatives in the past
that the purpose of IMO's Working List of Meteor Showers is to list
all showers which are currently known to be distinguishable from
the "Sporadic Background" by visual plots...
This isn't to say there may not be periodic showers, i.e., showers
subject to outbursts above the Sporadic Background, which will not
be worth observing by visual means. (An excellent example of this
would be the off-again, on-again June Bootids, which were removed
from the Working List a number of years ago, only to be revived by
an unexpected JBO outburst in 1998!) Nor is it intended to preclude
OTHER observational methods, such as telescopic plotting or video,
from being used on non-Working List showers. One thing the Working
List *is* intended to do, especially for newcomers to plotting, is
provide a limited catalog of well-established showers for us to use
in our own plotting analyses - but that's really it's ONLY purpose.
In other words, the Working List is the RESULT of doing statistical
analysis on observed data. It is NOT intended to be a FILTER to be
pre-applied to that data beforehand! Let's always try to keep the
("double-blind") nature of scientific observation in mind, folks!
There's further explanation of this in an early 'meteorobs' post,
where George Zay quotes a WGN article by Rainer Arlt at length:
http://www.tiacdot net/users/lewkaren/meteorobs/msg00238.html
Clear skies all!
Lew
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