29 January 2009

IMO Video Meteor Database updated 29JAN09

The latest edition of the IMO Video Meteor Database to our homepage has been updated http://www.imonet.org/database.html.
The PosDat files now contain 420,468 single station meteors recorded in 3,182 observing nights and 95,553 hours of effective observing time between 1993/01/02 and 2008/12/31.
A little anecdote:
When the PosDat format was invented, a three letter index was considered sufficient to link meteors in the data file to observing sessions in the header file. After all, that makes up for 26^3=17,576 observing sessions.
Well, by Dec 2008 we had collected 17,498 sessions (one session per camera and night) and got to the index ZWZ. When writing this we will have jumped over the three three letter limit, and next time I will have to use both letter and digits. That gives me a total of 36^3=46,656 header entries which should be sufficient for the next 2~3 years. ;-)
Sirko Molau
Abenstalstr. 13b
D-84072 Seysdorf
Germany

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