April 29th, 2011
I promised myself that I would wrap all this up before the end of April, and time has run out. If there were something significant left to do, I’d make the time to do it, but for now, I think I’ve run out of creative steam on this project. I may well re-visit this someday, but for now, there are other windmills taunting me that require my lance. Therefore, it’s time to summarize everything.
The main result of my work is a catalog containing 26,793 Leonids in the period from 1999 November 17th 23:00 UT to November 18th 03:30 UT. You can download this data and all the spreadsheets here (11 MB download).It contains the following files:
Catalogue Format: a TXT file specifying the format in which the data in the catalogues is organized.
Dataset Coverage: an EXCEL file specifying the times covered by each camera and, for periods for which there is no coverage, explaining the source of the problem.
The catalogues for each of the six cameras.
I also provide the source code (using the Eclipse IDE) I used for this project.
The conclusions I draw from all this information is as follows:
1. The peak of the outburst came at 0157 UT. (March 12th diary)
2. The earth went through the center of the streamer. ()
3. The particle density is well-described by the equation:
particle density(t) = 89 * e**(-absolute value(time-T)/33)
where time is expressed in minutes. (March 12th diary)
4. The absolute luminances of Leonids do not quite follow the power law that we’d expect. (March 17th diary)
5. I calculate an average deceleration for Leonids of 2.2 km/sec**2 (March 19th diary)
6. Before the peak, Leonids were on average bigger than average; Leonids near and after the peak had the same average size. (March 20th diary)
7. the value of f increased commensurately with length of the Leonid (with an interesting twist) (March 24th diary)
8. The final breakup of large Leonids shows some variability that is likely due to slight differences in internal structure. (March 25th diary)
9. Smaller, fainter Leonids paradoxically have higher initial luminances than larger, brighter Leonids. (March 26th diary)
10. Leonids exhibit nonrandomness in that Leonids appearing within 1 second of each other tend to be spatially closer than would be expected if they were randomly positioned in space. (March 27th diary March 28th diary)
11. There is no statistically significant evidence for large-scale (~1000 km) nonrandomness in Leonid positions. (April 25th diary)
You are welcome to examine the source code used for this project. I commented the crucial Leonid-detection methods reasonably well, but the statistical tests were all carried out on a more temporary basis and so they are poorly described. I make no promises that any of this will be in any way usable. Everything was done with Eclipse (Galileo). You can’t actually run the program, because you need the raw data it used. Good luck, you’ll need it.