Meteor showers from space | Hacker News Reader

Meteor showers from space

meteorshowers.org

164 pointsokket23 comments

Hi, I built this and want to share some background:

Each data point corresponds directly to a real meteor entry into the Earth's atmosphere recorded by NASA CAMS (http://cams.seti.org). Using this network of cameras, we can capture enough information about a meteor to compute its orbit around the sun. That means each particle has unique orbital parameters that accurately reflect a former meteorite in space.

In order to visualize the cloud, the epoch of these orbits is randomized. In other words, each particle begins at a random location in its orbit. This is done so the visualization can be continuous rather than only showing a clump of meteors from ~2012-2018.

Open source here: https://github.com/typpo/showers

This is extraordinary, Ian. Keep doing what you do :-)

I'm guessing that this uses WebGL. Yes?

Yes, that's right! Specifically, it uses three.js: https://threejs.org/

<pedantic> A meteorite is an object that hits the ground. A meteor burns up on the atmosphere. When they are still in space and only potential meteors/meteorites, they are called meteoroids. </pedantic>

Yup, I realized this mistake after I posted but the edit option was not available.

We took a drive out to the Minninglow dark sky site in the Peak District (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_District) in the small hours of this morning. It was quite amazing to witness the streaks of the Perseid meteor shower! We counted 30 over the course of an hour. No telescope required. The peak is meant to be tomorrow night. I highly recommend trying to catch it if you can.

I found the "MeteorActive" and "Clear Outside" iOS apps quite useful for picking the right time for the best view.

> No telescope required.

In fact, you should not use a telescope even if you have one. Meteors move fast and cross a significant fraction of the sky.

I’m pretty impressed with how fast this renders on my iPad!

Also what impressed me, but on my Android phone.

Loaded near instantly and played smoothly on my cheap android phone. Very impressive.

The zoom function zooms, but with unexpected delays and then gets stuck, but it might be something strange about my laptop.

Also, my first reaction to the title was "there are meteor showers that aren't from space?"

>Also, my first reaction to the title was "there are meteor showers that aren't from space?"

I was hoping it would be imagery capture from the ISS.

I've known that some meteor showers are better than others, but this makes it easy to tell visually with how dense/sparse each one appears.

This layout also made me wonder what would meteor showers look like from other planets. Mars has a thinner atmosphere, so maybe only larger debris would be visible?? But what about planets with thicker atmospheres?

Mars has a lot of dust in the atmopshere, which makes Martian astronomy more difficult. The Spirit rover did manage to capture an image of a comet though. There's some more detail on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy_on_Mars#Comets_and_m...

If you're interested in the concept of "alien astronomy" from other planets, I've used these "planetarium" style tools to play around with what it'd look like:

Light: http://stellarium.org/ Medium: https://celestia.space/ Heavy: http://spaceengine.org/

Why are all the meteors in this specific plane perpendicular to the planets' plane?

That was the direction the comet took when it first moved through. If you click on the dropdown menu in the top left, you can show all meteor showers at once. They are all in planes.

Insert MeteorActive" and "Clear Outside" into it. K tnx.

I only see orbits and the milky way, and none of the planets and meteoroids. Firefox Linux. Probably missing some webgl feature (other webgl demos work).

This is really nice looking, and I can only imagine it'd be even more amazing in VR.

A meteor is defined as body entering the atmosphere from space. Therefore "meteor showers from space" is redundant, just like saying "ATM machine".

I assume it's meteor showers [as viewed] from space, not a reference to their origin.

Good point.

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