Show HN: Perseids meteor shower from space | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Perseids meteor shower from space

ianww.com

136 pointstyppo19 comments

Last night at midnight I rented a zipcar with some friends, drove 30 minutes outside Philadelphia to a state park, lay down on the grass and watched shooting stars. Even in a region with significant light pollution [1], we saw clear and bright meteors every 2-3 minutes.

Coolest thing I've done in a long time. Definitely going on the fun-dad-activity-list for when I have kids.

[1] http://darksitefinder.com/maps/unitedstates-8color.html

Totally fun to do this. We would make a middle-of-the-night picnic of snacks and get the kids up in the middle of the night, drive someplace dark, and watch the amazing show in the sky.

That's exactly what me and my son did last night. Planned on going to the Chabot Space Center in Oakland where they have an actual viewing event but I fell asleep too early. Luckily I randomly woke up at 3am, grabbed my 7 yr old and drove over to the Windy Hill Open Preserve outside of Palo Alto. Sat in the back of the truck and saw a good 20 "meteors" till we got cold. He was late to school in the morning and I'm crashing at work but I'd say it was worth it.

Drove tp some 4 parks around LA. All of them had rangers kicking people out at midnight. I gave around 3am.

I live in the middle of the Silicon Valley, where we have very high levels of light pollution.

We just walked to a soccer field nearby. Took out some neoprene mats, unrolled them on the grass. Lay down on the mats, cover up with blankies. Now stay still and look up.

In about an hour or so the kids saw a dozen shooting stars, some of them very bright.

I was too busy searching for Ceres with the telescope to see any of that.

The Perseids don't care much about light pollution, which is why we had great success last night. But other meteor showers are much more sensitive to light.

UK checking in, between our group we saw 4 at a rate of 8 per hour around 22h45 GMT. Personally saw 2 very bright meteors.

I live in a small suburb in Ohio, so I took the kids (5 and 8) out back around 11pm last night and we threw out a blanket to watch. We saw a dozen or more, with 3 or 4 of them being good across-the-sky ones. Definitely one of those moments I'll cherish having shared with them. :)

What else is on that list if you don't mind me asking?

I'm not the original poster of that comment, but I'll answer what's on my list.

Soda bottle rocket launcher, Pickup baseball games, Solar Eclipse of 2017, spotting the ISS, Ham Radio, Making a forge to make molten metal, 3D print a design of theirs, Pinewood derbys, Electronics & Arduino games, Nerf gun wars, etc.

Way cool. Just curious, are the Persied points in this map/diagram/art representations of actual known objects?

If it is, then we're up for a big show in 2023!

Wow, this is really cool!

Great visualization! And I like to keep in mind the motion of the entire solar system: http://i.imgur.com/S6oyust.gif

Is this relative to the galactic core?

No. Unfortunately it's not relative to anything. Nasim Haramein, the guy behind that animation/idea, is a known physics quack. In the future I would suggest being skeptical of anything coming from his "institute": The Resonance Academy (http://resonance.is/)

It looks like it's largely correct [scale excepted] relative to a fly-by following the solar system relative to a point moving away from the sun on a perpendicular to the plane of the solar system.

Isn't one of the points of relativity that we can choose any point as an origin - in the gif are the motions relative to the sun [scale excepted] largely correct?

The main problem the sibling comment notes is that the plane _if_ it were following the orbit of the sun around the galactic centre it would be inclined by 60 degrees to motion along the orbit [they also note problems with exaggeration of the motion of the sun in its vertical motion (relative to the galactic plane) and in the precession of the plane of the solar system]. That doesn't make the gif wrong in itself, it just makes it not what people might assume it is.

Fastidious pedantry, sorry.

If we're going to be right lets be as right as we can; so please post corrections if I'm wrong at all.

All that aside I'd be really interested in seeing a simulation of the galaxy that matched observations for the precession of the solar system, movement of the planets, movement of the sun around the galactic centre. Does such a thing - that can be run at home - exist?

The GIF makes it look like the planets are trailing behind the Sun, which they are not at all. They orbit, so they constantly pass in front of it as well as behind it relative to its movement in the galaxy.

Relativity does tell us that there are no preferred inertial reference frames. But the comment I replied to was asking about a very specific reference frame: the galactic center.

And to one up your pedantry: relativity allows us to define our coordinate system in any inertial reference frame to compare with other inertial reference frames. The solar system orbiting the galactic center is not inertial since it is constantly accelerating.

Although this looks cool, it's a misconception. Phil Plait of "Bad Astronomy" has written about this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/04/vortex_m...

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