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(meteorobs) Archive of new or suspected radiants.
Uh-oh! Lew's back to being "Just curious". (-:
> BTW, your comment about the possible radiant in Taurus leads me to a
> question: Is there a central database of "radiants to be watched for"
> anywhere in the IMO - or regional meteor group - archives?
WIP: I did start a folder of cuttings of unusual meteor activity,
particularly telescopic, from journals like "Sky & Telescope", "The
Astronomer", and "Meteoros", and Corliss's books of strange phenomena.
It's not complete even for those. No doubt there are other sources
like "Meteor News". Since then we've learnt from Peter Jenniskens's
work that these apparent `one-offs' might be periodic `far-comet' type
outbursts appearing once a decade or longer. Peter might be able to
predict a future event like the Monocerotids, which can be verified. A
database of these reports is something I've wanted to see for many
years. We just(!) need someone to co-ordinate and collate.
I also have a list of detected and suspected telescopic radiants from
BAAMS and IMO observations. When I wrote the regular telescopic notes
for WGN, I did't like to push the suspected radiants too much lest it
biased future observations. They were "suspected" because there were
too few observations to rule out chance alignment or only seen in one
year or by one observer.
On the visual front, there may be lists being compiled from using
VISDAT and RADIANT. Analyses in WGN concentrate on the major showers.
I'd like to see more articles on minor showers derived from visual
plotting. There's a project for cloudy nights. Explore the VISDAT
archive (http://www.imodot net/visual/visdat/index.html), and hunt for
minor showers. Or when there's a report of a possible radiant in x,
consult earlier years to look for supporting evidence. I've used a
similar, but manual, method combining sparse telescopic data from
different years to confirm a shower's existence.
Malcolm
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