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Re: (meteorobs) Opik
> I remember reading an excellent article mentioning Opik back in (I believe)
> the December 1968 S&T. Back then, that magazine was very big on Opik's
> "double count" method for meteor observing.
The double count method can be extended to N observers. Given the
circumstances of this year's Leonids, when we have lots of observers
watching, and everybody looking at essentially the same place in the sky (as
far away from the full moon as possible), we should be able to do some very
interesting things with Opik's method. The toughest part will be dealing
with the high rate -- with short intervals in which there can be several
Leonids appearing at once, how can one determine whether two reports coming
in during that time period represent the same meteor?
Another problem will be determining the maximum rate. If we really do get
15,000 per hour at the peak, that's 4 per second average, and there will be
plenty of one-second intervals with ten Leonids in them. I don't think that
there's any way we can keep up with that kind of rate. There are a great
many possible approaches, which I won't go into here, but suffice it to say
that none of them are satisfactory.
Chris
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