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There's a moon in that video. That'll give you the angle more accurately than a building.
by mnw21cam 4y ago
There's a moon in that video. That'll give you the angle more accurately than a building.
- dmurray 4y agoHow? Everywhere nearby me, the moon is in the same direction, but my building isn't.
- Aachen 4y agoI considered that, but I don't think that works because where the moon appears in the sky also depends on where you are. There are two unknowns (moon and meteor) and one video (one equation), if I understand the math correctly (we didn't have solving multiple unknowns in school but this is the theory I heard in relation to GPS needing 4 sats to solve for x,y,z,time). It surprised me how many different combinations of meteor-moon constellations I saw in the various videos being posted. For some, the moon was very close; for me, the moon was like 110° removed I think (somewhere over my left shoulder). Maybe, knowing it was in England, it could help me to narrow down the scenarios (perhaps from an area down to a line?), but I don't have the experience to do that in a time-effective manner and I don't know if it would significantly help with the outcome.
- mnw21cam 4y agoThe exact location of the moon in the sky depends to a very small extent on your location on the earth's surface. The tweet says near Brighton, and that's already accurate enough to tell the direction of the moon much more accurately than the size of the moon in the sky. At the time of the video (3am UK time), the moon from brighton was at a compass heading of 144 degrees (calculated by Stellarium). The observer location of "near Brighton" is accurate to within a few km. The moon at that time had a diameter in the sky of 0.5225 degrees (it doesn't change much), so you can also get a reasonably accurate idea of the zoom level of the video, taking the size of the moon in pixels when it is most in-focus (and accounting a bit for glare).