Lucky to see a meteor?

[Guest]

As far as my experience goes and my technical understanding goes, the visual capture of a meteor does not affect whether random factors operate in your favour.

 

However, let us assume for one minute that seeing a meteor does have an effect on your luck (favourable random outcomes). We then have to ask, does it apply if we are actively looking for them? I would say that if we are looking at a predicted shower then we saw one when we were expecting/planning to, whereas if we were randomly stargazing and happened to see one, then we might expect random events to be more favourable. What also happens when you are observing a shower and see a sporadic meteor? I quite often see sporadic meteors while observing showers. In fact, the ZHR for sporadic meteors is about 10 per hour or just over 3 for your field of view. Most of us don't see sporadic meteors when we are out because we are looking through instruments. Most of us would not spend a clear night observing the night sky with Mk 1 eyeball.

 

I once saw a magnitude -6 fireball from Dusseldorf but, generally, I have been more lucky than unlucky since. This must surely imply that the brightness of a meteor has no additional effect on luck than a faint one.

 

Or... maybe seeing a meteor has no effect on luck at all.

 

Incidentally, I saw one sporadic and snapped one that I didn't see last night.

[Guest]

Long story but we've had one slice of good luck and one slice of bad over the weekend.