[typpo]

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/

[dylan604]

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

[gwill]

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

[dylan604]

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.

[scns]

Please be kind to yourself. Life is hard enough.

[dylan604]

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

[jeffbradberry]

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.

[EForEndeavour]

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

[hutzlibu]

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).