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(meteorobs) RE: distance from central vision



Paul,

>As unusual as Bill Gates must have been, there are others with his 
>exceptional capability.  

You are right.  In 1972 a Peter MacKinnon in Ottawa was seeing 150
Geminids/hour, at least twice his nearest competitor.  Cathy Hall will
recall this.  My top rate that year was 70, a record at the time, as the
Geminids were increasing their strength during the 70's.

There are others we don't know about out there.  In August when one of them
sends his high Perseid rates to S&T, there might be a tendency to report
more often the better results.  Almost every year I would read about someone
seeing 60-80/hour, and more, when I was only doing 40.  It was making the
Perseids look better than they are.  In the earlier years I was wondering
why I wasn't seeing such rates despite excellent skies.



> He would see everyone I saw 
>and a whole bunch that I didn't.  

That's what observing with Gates was like.  Gates would take on 5 of us and
smash us all at once.  It was very difficult to see any meteor that Gates
did not also see, assuming the same direction was being watched.


>He and I would be far ahead of everyone 
>else when we would observe in groups.

That's why the system of spacing observers evenly around the compass,
counting each meteor only once (the beginner's errant group-count), then
correcting back to individual rates, could not possibly work.  No need to be
roundabout anyway.  The two highest perceptions control the result : place
them facing opposite directions to maximize the final rate, adjacent to each
other to minimize the final rate.  George Spaulding of the BAA agreed to do
original  individual rates after I went over this problem with him in 1980.
He had already noticed the ZHR's were correcting to absurd levels.



>It really is a humbling feeling to observe with someone like this.  

That's for sure.  They see things most of us cannot see.  Gates saw 4/hour
from the Pisces Austrinids consistently when the rest of us rarely reached
2/hour -- does wonders on the group average.  The only thing Gates did not
see in 1975 was Upsilon Pegasids !  We didn't either -- for once all of us
were in agreement.


Norman
Norman W. McLeod III
Staff Advisor
American Meteor Society

Fort Myers, Florida
nmcleod@peganet.com

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