10 May 2007

NOAA can't even get the weather right here on earth most of the time so now NASA has created a weather map for an exoplanet.
NASA press release and a feature story.

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I borrowed a copy of PeterGrego’s Firefly book Solar System Observer’s Guide from the library and have looked at some of the tables. The first thing I did was to create a spreadsheet showing when meteor showers are active. Then I decided to see if there was any relationship between how many the ZHR of showers and the location of the radiant.

The incidence of meteor showers seems to be pretty well split between the northern and southern celestial hemispheres, but the more active showers are all in the northern hemishphere.

Next I looked at the speed of the meteors relative to the location of the radiant.

The circles I used to indicate speed didn’t seem to change size all that much so I graphed the number of meteors in each 10 km/s speed group from 0 km/s through 120 km/s.

The speed of the meteors doesn’t fall into a bell curve as you would expect. There is a group of slower meteors and a group of faster meteors and some very fast meteors.