MeteorCount 2.x for the Palm® Handheld Computer

A bottleneck in meteor observing is the data analysis. Software has been developed to make this easier, but meteor counts on tape or on paper roll have to be typed into a computer, whichs is still a tedious process. I wrote this simple Palm Pilot program in order to collect the data in a digital format right from the beginning - whichs makes the process of data analysis a matter of minutes.

This program is designed to make your meteor counting much easier. Instead of speaking your data on tape or writing them down on a paper roll as suggested by the IMO, you will collect them using your Palm Handheld. This is easy and fun. Normally only a single stylo stroke on one of the large fields on the Palm's touch screen display is needed to record a meteor of the most active stream (e.g. Perseid). You no longer have to bother with time intervals, as MeteorCount will note a precise time for each meteor. Thus you are much more flexible in analysing the data, since you can decide on your time intervals after the observations. Data analysis itself is done on your desktop PC and is a very rapid and easy. This is done by Ivan Goethals Meteor Companion program. Software is provided to convert the Palm MeteorCount data into the format required by Meteor Companion. After that, generating a fully fledged IMO Report Form for Counting including magnitude distributions for freely chosen time intervals is a matter of a few keystrokes.

Here you can

either download the complete package (800 KB) including everything you need to use your Palm handheld for counting meteors:

• The MeteorCount program for the Palm and Hot Paw Basic to run it.
• An auto-off utility that prevents the Palm from shutting down after some minutes.
• Ivan Goethals great Meteor Companion and a simple DOS program to convert the Palm data into Meteor Companion format.
• A detailed illustrated manual of how to use MeteorCount to count meteors and analyse your data.

or download an update just of MetCount 2.03(80 kB) if you already have the complete 1.x or 2.x package and Hot Paw Basic. It includes an extension to the Version 1.x manual, a complete 2.0 manual as plain text, without pictures, a new version of the DOS based file converter and the Source code of version 2.03

Meteor Count is freeware, as well as Meteor Companion. Hot Paw Basic is shareware, with the demo shareware version being fully functional when it comes to running MeteorCount.

You can download the illustrated manual as pdf (400 KB) in order to get the full information.

Contact: Hartwig Lüthen, Institut für Allgemeine Botanik, Ohnhorststr. 18, 22609 Hamburg. h.luthen@botanik.uni-hamburg.de