[Rockhounds] NW Meteor hunters, man your vehicles

[DonH]

J Bryan Kramer wrote:

> Say there is camera 'a' in one town and camera 'b' in a location 5 miles
> away. If you know the locations of the cameras and what direction they were
> pointing in. (which should be possible to determine by looking at the
> buildings in the background) Then by measuring the angle of the flash on
> both camera images you would get two lines to draw on a map. 


Hi,

You're thinking in terms of Cartesian coordinates, but there is a third 
coordinate here, the angle of entry (theta).  This problem cries out for 
a solution using polar coordinates (phi, rho, and theta), and at best 
the cameras will only give you two of them.  By taking into account the 
time stamp of the images, you might be able to get an approximation of 
the angle of entry; but given the wide area over which the phenomenon 
was seen, it was probably a shallow angle, giving more length to the 
vector of travel.

But don't worry, the meteorite crowd are dedicated, one might say 
fanatical, and I'm sure they were out looking as soon as the first 
reports came in!

Don