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Meteor showers from space
- codezero 8y agoI’m pretty impressed with how fast this renders on my iPad!
- taysix 8y agoAlso what impressed me, but on my Android phone.
- Waterluvian 8y agoLoaded near instantly and played smoothly on my cheap android phone. Very impressive.
- perl4ever 8y agoThe 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?"
- dylan604 8y ago>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.
- partycoder 8y agoA meteor is defined as body entering the atmosphere from space. Therefore "meteor showers from space" is redundant, just like saying "ATM machine".
- anamexis 8y agoI assume it's meteor showers [as viewed] from space, not a reference to their origin.
- partycoder 8y agoGood point.
- mwest 8y agoWe took a drive out to the Minninglow dark sky site in the Peak District (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- LeoPanthera 8y ago> 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.
- white-flame 8y agoThis is really nice looking, and I can only imagine it'd be even more amazing in VR.
- sonium 8y agoWhy are all the meteors in this specific plane perpendicular to the planets' plane?
- zeusly 8y agoThat 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.
- dylan604 8y agoI'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?
- mwest 8y agoMars 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_meteors 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/ http://stellarium.org/ Medium: https://celestia.space/ https://celestia.space/ Heavy: http://spaceengine.org/ http://spaceengine.org/
- typpo 8y agoHi, 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 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 https://github.com/typpo/showers
- stblack 8y agoThis is extraordinary, Ian. Keep doing what you do :-)
- mirimir 8y agoI'm guessing that this uses WebGL. Yes?
- typpo 8y agoYes, that's right! Specifically, it uses three.js: https://threejs.org/ https://threejs.org/
- goodcanadian 8y ago<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>
- typpo 8y agoYup, I realized this mistake after I posted but the edit option was not available.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kazishariar 8y agoInsert MeteorActive" and "Clear Outside" into it. K tnx.
- glandium 8y agoI 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).