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Re: (meteorobs) Do eyes work at all?

Chris,

I may be walking in without having seen your background work, but what you 
are doing sounds very similar to the multi-observer, "whole-sky" visual 
meteor work that the Canadians (at Spring Hill and other locations) 
pioneered and developed for many years (50's, 60's, and 70's).  A summary 
of their technique is contained in McKinley's "Meteor Science and 
Engineering" (McGraw-Hill: 1961), and Cathy Hall (a member of this list) is 
a veteran of their program from the 1970's.

 From what I remember from McKinley (my copy is at the office right now), 
the numbers that you sight do not sound too far from the typical for this 
group-counting method.  The important difference between what you are doing 
and what is the norm today is that while you are trying to determine the 
total number of meteors occurring per unit time in the entire "meteor 
meniscus" visible from a particular location, most methods today look for 
the number of meteors visible to a single 'standard' observer under 
standard conditions (which will include only a fraction of the total 
visible sky area).  Even in the single-observer method, it is somewhat 
surprising how rapidly visible perception drops off with decreasing meteor 
magnitude (the so-called Probability Function), with only the very 
brightest meteors within one's field of view being "detected" all the time.

A breakdown of your group-count meteor rates by meteor magnitude class will 
be a necessary next step in working with this method.  You might also give 
the appropriate chapter in McKinley a read (especially with regard to the 
derivation of their correction factors), as well as looking for copies of 
the papers that McKinley references.

Best regards,

Jim Richardson

------------------------------------------------------------------------
James Richardson
Department of Planetary Sciences
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL)
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ  85721

LPL email:  jrich@lpl.arizonadot edu
LPL phone:  (520) 621-6960
Home phone:  (520) 877-2715 or 877-2555
Cell Phone:  (520) 401-9095
Home page:  http://www.lpl.arizonadot edu/~jrich/

Operations Manager
American Meteor Society (AMS)
AMS email:  richardson@amsmeteors.org
AMS website:  http://www.amsmeteors.org/
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