If the Groundhog emerges tomorrow from his burrow in the bank and sees this –
– it won’t be February 2 at dawn, it will be November 17 at three in the morning, and what he sees will be a record-breaking meteor shower, like the one that Abraham Lincoln saw in 1833. Over 100,000 per hour – around 30 per second, a hundred or more visible at any instant.
(See the end note about enlarging illustrations.)
Either that, or the groundhog will be looking at one of the pages about meteors in the upcoming new edition of the Astronomical Companion.
I contrive this pretext for giving you a preview of the illustration because I’ve been working obsessively to make it a compromise between realism and pizzazz, and would be interested to know what you think.
The caption for the illustration will say:
If Earth were again to meet as dense a clump in the Leonid stream as it did in 1833, there would be a multitude of simultaneously visible meteors. Here we represent them by stars appearing to fall, as they were imagined to be, and give them the stars’ spectral colors, exaggerated. Meteors are more likely to be white, some with tinges of color. There are 181 in the picture, because I have spare stars fainter than magnitude 4 from falling.
You are forced to see, as Denison Olmsted saw, that the meteors of a shower appear to radiated from a point, therefore must be in paths parallel to each other, therefore must constitute a stream, therefore – since the shower recurs annually – must be in an orbit around the Sun.
Notice the point with a mark like a steering wheel for “Earth’s direction of motion.” The planet meets the stream of particles like a car meeting a swarm of gnats.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.
One way: right-click, and choose ”View image” or ”Open image in new tab”, then enlarge. Or choose ”Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version. Or, if you click ‘Refresh’ or press function key 5, you’ll see the latest version.
I like the diagram! You always do a great job of portraying multiple characteristics of the objects in your diagrams by varying things such as color, thickness, etc. I wondered if you could vary the brightness of the meteors you show by making some of them thick and others thin, or using brighter or dimmer shades of the colors that you are using? Certainly that is part of the experience of watching a meteor shower, seeing many faint streaks but some that are much brighter.
I did want to suggest, in an exaggerated way, that variation in color and brightness; decided to leave it to be done by the stars with their varied spectral types and magnitudes. I tried also for a way to make flare at a random place along the trail; so far it;s only a non-random thickening; may work on this again sometime.
I like it. It also expresses the percentages of spectral colors of stars.
There was a large meteor shower sometime around 1948 or 49–I was pretty young but remember hundreds per hour for an hour or so. Any idea of which it was and when? I was in Berkeley, CA at the time and we were all sitting outside after dinner so it was not likely deep winter…
Thanks,
Kirk
There was a storm of the Draconids in 146, but that would have been about the beginning of October. More digging needed, perhaps in the archives of the IMO.
I like it with the Pizzazz