Friday, October 9, 2015

Smartwatch app for meteor logging

Marking down the path and intensity of meteors during showers can provide useful data for astronomers. It can also simply be a nice way of logging what can be a spectacular event. But I always found it difficult to mark down a meteor's path on a paper sheet. It would be much easier to directly retrace the path through the sky with a gesture. Intensity would be slightly harder to log, but it is usually done with reference to another star or planet of similar magnitude. Perhaps the app could have four stages: 1) gesture path; 2) feedback that path has been accepted with option to manually correct it on an associated phone; 3) point to a reference star; 4) feedback that magnitude has been set.

A similar approach might be useful for other logging tasks as well, for example wilderness tracking, perhaps with speech-to-text to tag the species, etc.

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