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(meteorobs) Recruiting observers for Leonids
I am going into final preparations for the multi-observer project in
Arizona. When last I told this list about it, many details were still
undetermined, but now those details are filling in nicely. We have a good
site in Arizona, perhaps a little too remote -- we have to use Ham radio to
report our real-time results over the Internet to the NASA site. For a
variety of reasons, I have trimmed the observer count from 32 to 28. The
observers will be using keypads rather than single pushbuttons to report
their observations. This will not be difficult to do in the dark because the
keypads are used primarily for positional data: the "5" key represents the
center of the field of view, and the surrounding keys represent the
surrounding octants. I will even be able to accept magnitude entries, but
entering such data is optional for the observer. The keypads have been
ordered, but the cursed supplier was slow and they won't be here until
Tuesday.
I have also come up with a rather clever scheme (if I do say so myself) for
orienting the observers. They'll be laid out on the ground in a daisywheel
formation, and overhead will be a spiderweb of wires holding LEDs. The
spiderweb will be composed of standard 300-ohm antenna wire (the flat kind),
with the LEDs soldered on at locations calculated to provide sky markers for
the observers underneath. While I'm at it, I'll mark all the cables on the
ground and all the guy wires with plenty of LEDs for safety. The place will
look like a 60-foot wide flat Christmas tree.
The hardware and software are all coming along nicely. I shall soon begin
programming a little training program for observers to try their hands at on
the afternoon before the shower. The only serious uncertainty concerns our
ability to transfer the data in real time from our computers to the ham
radios and eventually onto the Internet.
The biggest issue now is recruiting enough observers. I figure that I need
40 people signed up, so that there are enough extras to cope with no-shows
and people who want to take a break during observations. So I'm asking for
any and all volunteers from this list. I really need your help here! So if
you are able to make it to western Arizona for the Leonids, or you know
anybody who could, please email me. I don't need any kind of experience or
special skills -- just the ability to push a button when you see a meteor.
If you'd like to see full details on the project, you can find them at:
http://www.erasmatazz.com/Leonids/Leonids.html
Thanks,
Chris Crawford
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