The Aurigid Laptop Meteor Observation Project

In cooperation with the NASA/SETI Aurigid Meteor Airborne Campaign

On Friday night/Saturday morning, August 31/September 1, when we will have an outburst of the Aurigid meteor shower. An outburst is a sudden, short burst of a lot of meteors. They're very difficult to predict, but the best guess just now is that there will be about 200 meteors visible per hour at the peak -- but the peak comes at 4:36 AM Pacific Daylight Time, which means that it won't be visible from anywhere but the western United States and Hawaii. I have put together a scheme to permit a multitude of people to participate in a unique scientific experiment.


What is it?


The Aurigid Laptop Meteor Observation Project uses the Internet to accomplish something that has never been done before: combine the observations of thousands of people in order to build a three-dimensional map of a meteor stream. For all of history, meteors have been observed by independent observers, giving us an ant's-eye view of the forest. But with the Internet, the ants can combine their observations and, for the first time in history, we will be able to see the whole forest at once!


What do I need to participate?


The technology required is trivial: a laptop and a pair of eyeballs. All you do is watch the meteors and click the mouse whenever you see a meteor. A small Java applet records the time of your mouseclicks into a file. The next day, you email that file to us, and we put it into a monster program that combines all the observations of all the people and builds a satellites-eye-view movie of where the meteors hit. The results will be available for everybody.


What does it cost?


Absolutely nothing. I don't want your money. This is a community effort requiring nothing but your own participation.


What do I do?



First, you download the Aurigid program onto your laptop. On meteor night, you go outside at the right time, lie down, face in the correct direction, turn on your laptop, and launch the Aurigid program. Whenever you see a meteor, you click the mouse. Observe meteors for as long as you want. When you're done, quit the Aurigid program and shut down your laptop. The next day, type your longitude and latitude into the log file, and email it to us. That's all it takes. Here are detailed instructions.

Do I get anything in return?


The only thing you get out of this is the fun of participating in a community effort that constitutes real scientific research. I'll credit you for your contribution.


Where can I learn more?


You can find full information on the Aurigid outburst at the NASA/SETI web page here.




*adapted by Lucimary Vargas