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(meteorobs) minor showers everywhere ...

Folks,

> Europe should have low Leonid rates this year, so observers who will stay
> here will be able to look for the possible radiants.

... and video cameras don't care about the Leonid activity at all (as
Richard mentioned before). They will record any non-Leonid meteor even if
the Leonid rate is storm-like. I don't like to repeat myself, but you
do not have to wait until next November. The were hundreds of non-Leonids
recorded during the recent November campaigns. *If* there really was some
minor shower active in Auriga or elsewhere, it should have manifested
itself in the video data. We do have pictures from each individual meteor,
so if something is found we may re-analyse the interesting meteors for
highest possible accuracy.

BTW, I don't think statements like "I saw a few suspicious meteors but did
not plot them" will help us a lot. There are always sporadic meteors
(regardless of the Leonid activity), and there are always sporadic
fireballs. It has been discussed more than once on this list that we have
by-chance alignments of sporadics in every night, which may look like the
radiant of a minor shower. If you really want to pin down such a shower,
you need to plot and later analyse your data carefully at the desk. Even
more, you will need to collect observations (plots!) from other observers
in order to improve the statistics. If a minor shower has a ZHR of one or
two, you will see only very few shower members even when observing the
whole night. If it's ZHR is 10 or more, it will most certainly have been
recognized by other observers before unless you are the only witness of a
rare outburst.

I'm really not suggesting that IMO's meteor shower working list is
complete. New minor showers have been been detected before (just check the
recent IMC proceedings for contributions from our Polish observers, for
example), but these were based on accurate plots and data collection of
many observers.

Best regards,
Sirko

PS: What I find personally most intriguing is the fact, that new
showers are in most cases not suspected by the most active visual
observers, but by occasional observers. This is not meant to offend
anybody, please, but I would expect that those who log hundreds of hours
each year (not me :-) should have most experience and much better chances
to detect a new shower.

--
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*  Dipl.-Inform. Sirko Molau                  *                          *
*  RWTH Aachen, Lehrstuhl fuer Informatik VI  *              __          *
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*  email: molau@informatik.rwth-aachendot de     *                          *
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*  www  : http://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachendot de/Colleagues/molau       *
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