Kim wrote:

What about when instrumentation or photographs are available? Does meteor brightness have any scientific value in that case?

I don't know the answer to the photgraphic or the scientific value of magnitude question. This is an area that I'm just getting into. For that shower, I had put together and was doing an initial test run on a meteor camera with an 18 deg TFOV but was not lucky enough to get any streamers. I decided that I need to do another run at remachining a C-to-T lens connector to get the camera to work properly. As Chuck pointed out, the gold standard amateur meteor imaging project is to capture a low-res spectrograph to see what kind of emission lines can be seen. A sample photo from Saturday mornings shower can be seen on the NASA Ames site. Once I get the camera really working, I intend to try a grating in front of it to see what can be captured. The camera no's biggee. It's just a Meade DSI-1 or a DSI-Pro that that has an SLR fish-eye lens attached through a Pentax(bayonet)-to-C(male) adapter and a C(female)-to-T(male) connector. The Edmund Optics C-to-T adapter had to be modified by machining in order to get the camera to focus. The camera tracked the radiant by mounting on a GEM. The real way to do this would probably be to just put a fish-eye lens (about $200) on a digital SLR like a Canon Rebel D20 to get a full 120 degree TFOV. Then pull the images in real time out of the camera through a USB2 wire to a laptop for astronomical image processing. Since I don't own a Canon Rebel that's another $800, so I decided to try a poor man's kludge. Chris Peterson has a video camera design posted on his website previously referenced. The key to his video design appears to be special order lens listed on his plans - a Rainbow L163VDC4P 1.6-3.4mm lens - which means nothing to me. - Kurt _______________________________________________ Sent via CSolutions - http://www.csolutions.net