The People Behind the Perseid Meteor Showers

newyorker.com

31 pointsanthotny3 comments

If anyone's interested in seeing the orbits of Comet Swift-Tuttle and its debris that forms the Perseid meteor shower, I made a webgl visualization here showing all the moving parts: http://www.ianww.com/meteor-showers/

Awesome awesome work! Splendid visualization, might as well put it today on my 2nd monitor as a screensaver.

One small remark - some of the meteors/perseids should lose their orbit and disappear when they enter some planets atmosphere, but they are constantly produced by the comet anyway. Might be good idea to also add the comet itself?

Agreed, very cool. Could you share if there is a specific procedure for adding webgl background animations, of what OSes this is possible in? Mac/win/BSD/*nix?

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