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Re: (meteorobs) The ongoing importance of visual observing (was Re: LINEARID meteor shower in July?)



Quoting Rob McNaught <rmn@aaocbn.aaodot gov.AU>:


> Once routine nightly two-station observations
> begin, the video observations will go into another dimension yet again.

Hi Folks,

I fully endorse what Rob McNaught is saying here and in his other message. 
Concerning the latter message, I have worked several times with activity (ZHR) 
curves for both visual and video data and found that getting curves from video 
data is not easy, although it is possible. This was actually one of the reasons 
I guess why they adopted a hybrid video-visual technique in the 1999 Leonid MAC 
mission. So for that type of work, visual observations are still paramount (and 
will be for a very long time I think). And even if some day it will be possible 
to get accurate activity curves from video data routinely, that will not make 
curves from visual data obsolete, because the entering of a new technique in 
the field not necessarily kills the other: you can keep using both alongside 
each other. Also, some types of data (e.g. minor streams) will still demand 
long-term observations in the sense of years, so visual will certainly remain a 
match for video.

With regard to the remark above, two- or multi-station video work really is 
able to yield significant results, notably on minor streams. Our DMS database 
of video orbits currently contains a thousand multi-station orbits of very good 
accuracy, most obtained during the second part of the last decade and while 
effectively running the setups only a few nights per year (during the major 
campaigns like Perseids, Lyrids, Orionids, Leonids, Geminids and Quadrantids). 
But the botlleneck is the reduction of the images at the moment, which even 
with the help of "quick" measuring software is very time consuming. Unless 
someone makes an application which is able to not only identify but also 
measure meteor images automatically with the very **high accuracy** needed, 
this will remain an intensive job in the sense of man-hours. Actually, current 
video setups such as we employ within DMS for two-station observations in the 
Netherlands perform (in sense of number of meteors multistation imaged/night) 
quite like, or even slightly better then, the well known Harvard Super Schmidt 
patrol of the fifties. There they already encountered the problem of succombing 
in data that are very time-consuming to reduce. Their cameras performed too 
well and large scale employment of video cameras potentially yields the same 
pitfall.

Finally, I fully endorse the remark (wasn't it Joseph Assmus?) about the 
continuing fun of just being out under a starry sky being most important. I 
happened to note that a video camera is not such an entertaining comrade in the 
field as well as afterwards compared to a life person. You can talk to it but 
it never talks back about how fine and beatifull that -2 meteor actually was...

Marco Langbroek
Dutch Meteor Society (DMS)



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