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(meteorobs) call for observers
I've been preparing a rather unusual setup for the 1999 Leonids. I started
with a
BASIC Stamp 2, a nifty little microcontroller on a chip that you program in
BASIC, and then I added some interface stuff to it, and the result is a
computer
for recording the meteor observations of a group of up to 16 people. My
intention is to have the 16 observers laid out in a circular pattern, each
observer assigned a unique central point in the sky to observe, the central
points being uniformly distributed. In other words, the full sky is evenly
covered by the 16 observers. Each observer gets a little pushbutton unit on a
cable; you push the button when you see a meteor. When you do so, a tiny beeper
inside your unit beeps; a little LED on my computer lights up, and the BASIC
Stamp sends a signal to my Macintosh PowerBook, which records the time (to a
tenth of a second), and which observer pressed his button. An additional
feature
is the monitoring of observer availability. If you want to take a break, you
simply unplug your button unit and the BASIC Stamp sends an appropriate message
to the Macintosh, which records that you are off-line; when you plug back
in, it
notes that as well. Also, a little green LED on your pushbutton confirms that
you are plugged in and operational.
Unfortunately, I was clouded out of the Perseids -- the first time I have
missed
the Perseids in 33 years -- so my dress rehearsal with the system never
happened. However, I have built some testing circuitry and have learned a bit
about system performance. It polls each button about 30 times per second. It
handled 5 events per second for two hours without dropping a single event, and
the upper limit on event count is decided by the size of the hard disk. Each
event costs 12 bytes, so a 1 gigabyte hard disk could handle 80 million events.
I'll be doing power consumption tests and temperature sensitivity tests during
the remaining time.
I'm assuming that I'll be able to get a full complement of 16 observers for the
Leonids, and that there'll be lots of meteors to work with. The richness of the
shower should give me enough statistics to do some interesting things. First, I
hope to take another crack at the old temporal nonrandomness issue, which has
never been answered to my satisfaction -- the data just haven't been good
enough. Second, I think that we will answer once and for all the old question,
"Where's the best place to look?" Sure, we all believe that the zenith is the
best spot, but do we have any data to prove it? There are some physiological
reasons to believe that distance from the radiant could indeed be an important
factor. We might also be able to use this data to get a much clearer idea of
just how reliable the human observer really is -- sort of a modified and vastly
enlarged Opik double-count. The statistical analysis will have to be more
complicated due to the fact that observers aren't looking at the center point,
but that can be used to our advantage as well.
So here I am all dressed up and ready to go to the dance, but the big
shebang in
Jordan is beyond my means, so where will I go? Surely not my home in Oregon --
it will almost surely be cloudy. Much examination of meteorological data leads
me to conclude that the surest bet in the USA is the Rio Grande valley in New
Mexico; the data I have seen indicates that they have NEVER had
precipitation in
November since they began taking records! Moreover, a local resident and friend
assures me that November is always clear and cold. She's scouting observing
sites for me.
Which brings me to the purpose of this post. First, I'm recruiting
observers for
this thing. I could sure use a passel of warm eyeballs. Indeed, if I get a lot,
the computer can readily be expanded to handle 32 observers. Any volunteers?
Second, is there already some organized operation planned for the southwest?
Third, can ANYBODY straighten me out on the best time? Extensive web searching
has served to establish just two certainties: the ideal time for the storm is
Nov 18th at about 2:00 UT. That's about 7:00 PM on the 17th in New Mexico, not
very encouraging given that the storm has a half-width of about an hour.
There's
also the bright-meteor peak some 19 hours earlier, which is about midnight on
Nov 16-17 in New Mexico. Based on this, I'm planning for the night of the
16th-17th. But I have this awful feeling that I'm miscalculating. Can anybody
comment on my reasoning?
Fourth, if there's interest in building devices similar to mine, I'd be
happy to
cobble together the plans for mine. It cost about $150, not including the Mac
and a power inverter for the Mac. If you use a Mac, I can supply you with the
software, but you can use a Wintel machine if you're willing to do some simple
programming on your COM port. Warning: if you do use a Wintel machine,
you're on
your own -- I myself would never attempt to program one of those things.
Chris Crawford
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