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The Quadrantid meteor shower 2024 peaks tonight alongside a bright moon
- typpo 3y agoI 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 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/ http://cams.seti.org/
- dylan604 3y agoYup, 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
- gwill 3y agothere's a drop down at the top of the page where you can choose a shower/ or all of them.
- dylan604 3y agoohmuhgawd. 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.
- EForEndeavour 3y agoWow, this is incredibly cool! It's nerd-sniping me into wanting to (try to) learn WebGL and orbital mechanics.
- hutzlibu 3y agoUnless 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).
- jeffbradberry 3y agoThis 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.
- polishdude20 3y agoLooks like for westerners 2am to 6pm is the best time to look. Originating around the Bootes constellation.
- dylan604 3y ago>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
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoWhere 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.
- dylan604 3y agoOkay, 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.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoScripture 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?"
- ok_dad 3y agoIs 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
- MOp_6899 3y ago[flagged]