CAOSP abstracts, Volume: 41, No.: 1, year: 2011

Abstract: The contribution of the real dispersion of the orbital elements is deduced from the long-period orbits, where an excess over the parabolic value is likely to be entirely due to measuring errors, as well as from comparing observed dispersions in different catalogues, where the observational errors should be different to each other. Shower meteor data from the IAU Meteor Data Center have been analysed with the aim of determining the orbits' distribution in the streams, based on the dispersion of their reciprocal semimajor axes. It has been shown that the major part of the observed differences in the semimajor axes within meteor streams is not due to a real dispersion of orbits but due to measuring errors.