The Quadrantid meteor shower 2024 peaks tonight alongside a bright moon | Hacker News Reader

The Quadrantid meteor shower 2024 peaks tonight alongside a bright moon

space.com

68 pointssva_18 comments

I posted this visualization of mine in a recent thread on the Quadrantids, but sharing again because people seemed to enjoy it: https://www.meteorshowers.org/view/Quadrantids

It uses meteor data from NASA CAMS [1] to reconstruct the meteoroid cloud that creates the Quadrantids. When Earth passes through the cloud every year, we see a meteor shower.

Each particle in this visualization represents an actual meteor that burned up in the Earth's atmosphere. CAMS reconstructs the orbit of the meteor based on its entry trajectory by triangulating multiple recordings. CAMS is very cool!

[1] http://cams.seti.org/

Yup, that is definitely cool AF! Is this same visualization available for other showers? Don't want to sound greedy, but this is so compelling, I'm now curious what the other showers look like

there's a drop down at the top of the page where you can choose a shower/ or all of them.

ohmuhgawd. hangs head in shame. i played with the box in the upper right. i looked at the bottom left to see the inset to locate the radiant. But my eyes glazed over at the information in the top left after reading the title anxious at getting to the glorious imagery.

Please be kind to yourself. Life is hard enough.

fair enough, but i do like to own up to my times of committing ID10T errors

Wow, this is incredibly cool! It's nerd-sniping me into wanting to (try to) learn WebGL and orbital mechanics.

Unless you really want to learn WebGL (in which case you probably should rather learn WebGPU) - I would recommend learning a framework making use of it, so ThreeJS or BabylonJS are probably the best choice, to get results fast (unless you have prior GPU programming experience).

This seems like a cool concept, but it's broken for me.

Firefox 113.0.2 shows the orbits and background, but no particles as far as I can tell.

Chromium 120.0.6099.129 shows just a black screen plus the widgets, nothing else.

Both on amd64 Debian Linux.

Update: bumping FF to 121.0 did not seem to help.

Looks like for westerners 2am to 6pm is the best time to look. Originating around the Bootes constellation.

>Looks like for westerners 2am to 6pm is the best time to look. Originating around the Bootes constellation.

hmm, I'm going to disagree with that. I'd guess anything after sunrise would be a lot of wasted effort. maybe you meant 6am? that's a heck of a typo

Where I am the sun sets at 4:23 pm, so there’s time between that and 6 pm. Doesn’t not make any sense to me.

Okay, so 2am decreasing in visibility closer to sunrise, and then visible again after sunset to 6pm. "Best viewing times" would not be anything I would ever use while the sun was up unless we're talking about viewing the sun.

Scripture scholars recount an amusing proposition about Genesis 15:5, where God takes Abram outside and challenges him to "count the stars, if you can"

So they suggest that Abram was taken outside in broad daylight, and God was perhaps teasing him a little bit; perhaps the ancients were even aware of things like the star nature of the Sun and the invisible stars present at daytime.

It's cool to think about it. Imagine Abram gazing up and counting quite invisible stars, or arriving at a star-count of 1 and going "seriously?"

Is there a way to figure this out for a given lat-lon? I’m in Hawaii and find space event things are routinely quite different here since we’re as far away from LA as LA is from NYC

[1] timeanddate.com is a great site that provides a visualization with times and directions for a given city.

I don't think its possible to link directly to a specific lat/lon, so you'll have to choose the city yourself.

For Honolulu the "very good" times are between 2am-6am HST, with the direction about 40 degrees (NE)

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/meteor-shower/quadrant...

It’s the same time everywhere, occurring in the entire sky. You get more meteors on the leading edge of the Earth moving forward in its orbit, so starting at 1AM solar time gets more meteors. You generally stop being able to see them when the sun rises. All you need to look up are the peak days.

“Everywhere” excludes the poles though, things get a bit wonky above 80° latitude.

The free version of the app Stellarium allows you to search for such things and locate them in the sky.

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