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Sunday, August 26, 2007

 

The Aurigid Laptop Meteor Observation Project

On September 1 there is predicted to be a brief outburst of the Aurigid Meteor Shower. Meteor observer Chris Crawford wants to correlate the observations of a multitude of observers across the western USA to assemble a 3D model of the Aurigid stream.

He has written a short Java application that records the time whenever the user clicks on the
mouse. The trick here is that most laptops are synchronized to an Internet time standard, so the time data recorded will be meaningfully correlated between observers. Those times are assembled into a data file that the user emails to Chris on the morning after the Aurigids. This is an excellent community participation project.

So if you are interested in participating in this project, see the Auriguid Laptop Meteor Observation Project page, and see here for detailed instructions.

Sadly, the Auriguids are very low on the horizon from Australia, and we can only observe 7 hours after the predicted maximum, so we we will be unlikely to see anything. But if any of my US readers are interested, give it a go!

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