The computer programs to check the internal consistency of the meteor-shower data

Abstract

. At times, it becomes necessary to verify the internal consistency of meteor shower characteristics, regardless they are one’s own observations or information taken from the literature. A check of internal consistency also appears desirable when the shower characteristics are reported to the Meteor Data Center (MDC) of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). In this article, we describe and provide software that we have developed, which is capable of performing checks of internal consistency between the mean geocentric parameters (solar longitude, geocentric radiant, and geocentric velocity) and mean orbital elements (perihelion distance, eccentricity, argument of perihelion, longitude of ascending node, and inclination) of a shower or several showers. The program is freely accessible (Fortran77 source code as well as executable static binary code) along with this article or from the IAU MDC web pages.