Leonid Meteor Storm 2001, Texas, Count Rate Chart; HAL-PC Excel SIG

Our Next Meeting: Wednesday, February 6, 2002

6:30-7:00 pm	General Questions and Problems from the Audience Puzzler: Have the computer record the current time. Bonus: Be able to record to the millisecond the time when you press a certain key.
7:00-8:00 pm	One Hour App: Turn a series of timed meteor sightings from the Leonids Meteor Shower in to a chart that shows the rate of meteors per hour as a function of time. See chart below: The techniques used are: scatter charts, secondary y-axis, lookups, OFFSET, linear fits, AVERAGE
8:00-8:10 pm	(Break)
8:10-9:00 pm	To be decided: Perhaps a continuation of the Leonid example using the Poisson's distribution to test whether the 600/hr peaks are statistical significant.

On November 18, 2001, the Leonid Meteor Shower was visible from cloudless skies in Texas. I used a video camera as an audio recorder to capture the meteor sightings.. By recording with the clock visible, it was possible to record to the precise second when a meteor was spotted. From midnight to 6am, my son Ryan (8 years old) and I spotted 702 meteors. From 3:20 am to 5:00am we saw 550 of them, sometimes in bursts of 1 per second.

The first problem is to find an efficient way to take each of the events heard on the tape and record the time. The time is visible in the view finder, but it is extremely inefficient to pause the tape, read the time in the viewfinder, type in in, and continue the tape. Instead, I found a way to press a key each time I heard a sighting, and have Excel record the elapse time from the start of the tape. With an occasional check with the actual time on the tape recorder, I was able to capture the time of each meteor with one continuous playback of the tape.

The second problem is to take the times of the sightings and convert them into a graph that shows meteor rates per hour on a minute by minute basis.