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RE: (meteorobs) Re: Leo 2001 coverage in S&T 3/2002
> When the copy for the March issue went to press, even less was known/published
> from the IMO data.
Simply not true: As I said in my letter - and as is evident from the first few
links in the sidebar of the www.astro.uni-bonndot de/~dfischer/mirror/230.html lead
article, a pretty consistent picture existed about a week after the storms, more
than 4 weeks before the article for the March issue was closed.
> they deserved to have their stories told
No questions about that, but the *level* of these stories and the lack of any
attempt to present a serious 'big picture' is what bothers me. You could find
the same personal stories n-fold in this and other mailing lists within 24
hours of the event.
What a serious magazine should have done is to pick a few particularly well-written
soundbites and merge that with the full picture of the event. There is no excuse
for not having done that already for the March issue: Remember that there was
even a quick Leo 2001 report in the February issue, so there was a full month to
get it right. It would have been *so* simple - even the visuals were out there:
The instructive ZHR plot www.spaceweather.com/meteors/leonids/2001/zhr_imo_big.gif -
for instance - was available less than a week after the storms.
By the way, if you really want to get angry at S&T, look into their 1966 coverage
of the big Leonid storm: The first article was already near-perfect. I see no
reason to let the standard slip significantly one orbit of Tempel-Tuttle later ...
Daniel
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