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(meteorobs) Re: call for observers

Chris,

This sounds most interesting! Actually I have never heard it said that
looking at the zenith is the best place to center your field of view.
When looking straight up you are facing the thinnest column of air 
therefore meteor activity will be minimal. It is better to place the 
lower limit of your field of view directly on the horizon which centers
your field of view near 60 degrees altitude. At this angle one is
looking
through a much thicker layer of atmosphere which will provide more 
activity. Still, I look forward to your results!

I know of no organized Leonid watch from the southwestern USA.

As for watching from New Mexico I doubt that you will find many people 
willing to travel far to join you. To alleviate this situation I would
suggest contacting the Astronomy Department at nearby New Mexico State 
University and inquiring if any students would be willing to help you
out 
on this project.

As for the best time it will occur at near 2:00 Universal Time on the
18th 
so you can understand why people are planning to watch from Europe,
Africa, 
and Western Asia. Unfortunately the bright meteor peak which occurred in 
1998 is not expected to produce a repeat performance so watching on the 
16/17 will produce little activity.

I wish you well on this project and would be most interested in your 
results. I would also encourage people to participate and to enjoy the 
clear dark skies of New Mexico. Unfortunately I will be in Europe at
that
time and will not be able to help out.

One last item Chris, Peter Jenniskens mentions you as part of the
NASA/AMES
team that is flying during the Leonid display this year. I guess since
you
are not heading overseas with him that you are lending your expertise in 
developing the hardware beforehand?

Bob Lunsford


Chris Crawford wrote:
> 
> 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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