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Re: (meteorobs) Re: Leonid rate predictor URL (Daniel Fischercomments regarding Jenniskin)



> He (Dan) mentioned that Jenniskin's site had just been updated

I didn't say that, and it hasn't happened so far anyway. Moreover, Peter
Jenniskens did not hand me a copy of his present study, as I had hoped, and
thus the only data I have so far to judge the importance of his apparent
discovery of some of the dust trails shifting a bit towards the Sun are some
video images I recorded during his presentation. During the past 16 months,
Jenniskens has a) declared the 2001 Leonids storm a non-event, b) declared the
Asher-McNaught-Lyytinen view valid (i.e. 2000 meteors/hr for the U.S., 8000/hr
for Asia) and c) declared the U.S. maximum one of the biggest in history
with 32000/hr while the Asian one would drop to a mere 2000/hr.

All these results are based on very similar input data: maximum rates the
Leonids reached in various years and the widths of the maxima. Then some
"iterative process" (Jenniskens' own words) is used to come up with a model
for the dust trail densities and shapes and locations. What bothers me is the
apparent instability of the result as the addition of just one new data point
(his own observations of the 2000 Leonids over the U.S. from an airplane)
has led to a drastic revision of the (a) result to (b) - and now we are to
believe that (c) is the ultimate wisdom. Peter has promised to bring the
fascinating paper (which I could just glance over) into a publishable form
during this month and to get NASA's permission to put it on a website.

Stay tuned - I certainly will ...

Daniel (now back from the Arctic Circle)
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