Talk:Meteor shower

Untitled
Why did meteor showers start in the 1800's? seriously. the earliest recorded meteor shower was 1799 according to history.com... weve been watching the sky as a people for millenia, doesnt it give anyone else a little bit of an unsettled feeling knowing that meteor showers just started not too long ago? spoooky... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.185.6.229 (talk) 21:15, 22 April 2015 (UTC) Not everything that links to "radiant" is using this meaning. Maybe there should be a disambig there.

Unencyclopedic tone
Wow. That cliché has been there for two years and no one complains? Melchoir 00:46, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
 * "From earliest times, humankind..."


 * Well, the encyclopedic policy and tone are a little dry and rejectingly aloof, so nobody complains! Rursus 11:09, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Use of Yahoo Answers
Oofis (talk) 17:39, 26 September 2008 (UTC)Oofis*Oofis (talk) 17:39, 26 September 2008 (UTC) What are meteors? Yahoo answers might help. Create an account [yahoo] ask your own questions, or post answers. ←→ ± ×÷°§−≤≥≠ ^^

Does This Help?? Edit and answer...


 * I don't know exactly what Oofis was trying to say, but I thought it should be here and not in the article proper KevinCuddeback (talk) 03:30, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

photo of a trail
could someone figure out if the image/description here is ok copyright for wikipedia? It's just so good but I generally find copyright issues confusing - see http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2005-04/ssc2005-04a.shtml --Smkolins 04:51, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Comet identity
Quadrantids and South Delta Aquarids are connected to 96P/Machholz (?), but the end note says that the comet 96P/Machholz 2 AKA 1994o (???), autosmithereenized in 1994. But 96P/Machholz was discovered 1986, sez relevant article. What is then this 1994o stuff about? Rursus 11:09, 27 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Well from Comet Machholz it looks like the same discoverer for two comets with parts of these names and the former is the more famous. Going to Southern Delta Aquariids takes you to a citation which mentions 96P/Machholz specifically and not 1994o so it looks like we have a typo. --Smkolins 00:44, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

link to Eta Aquarids
?spelling of Eta Aquariids.

Eta Aquarids has a link125.238.100.74 22:51, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

(like opening a curtain, with grains piling up at the beginning and end of the gap)
Hi,

I don't get the connection. At least it took me more time to understand the sentence's idea than to understand what's happening. Maybe one could make it clearer that the dust that was put into a different orbit stays in that orbit for all time (when forgetting about afresh interaction with the earth). And that it has a different period now. And that the new orbit keeps hitting the earth orbit as it originated from there. 87.78.69.173 08:54, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

coming from the same point in the sky
How fast is the dust on the orbit? Just as fast as the comet? I think it needs to have the same speed (as a function of the place not the time). So I don't understand how the spreading over the orbit works, when this needs a different speed then the comet, and this means leaving the orbit?

But back to the question? I'd like to know how fast the dust is relative to earth speed. If the earth were much faster, one could see the meteors coming from the tangentialline to the orbit of the earth. Is that the case or is the speed of the comets higher?

JanCK 09:00, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Could I just point out that the article says something about anticipating a shower on 12/20/07. Unless I missed it and we're standing on a temporal Mobius strip now, somebody should pay a bit more attention to this page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.98.73.82 (talk) 05:46, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Radiant points
Comment moved from Talk:Meteor shower/Comments. Astronaut (talk) 13:02, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

I suggest adding the following text at the end of the first paragraph of "Radiant Points":

A little before sunrise, a person at mid-lattitudes hwo is looking straight up is generally looking forward along the earth's orbit (with some variance with season and with lattitude of the observer), and thus is looking into the debris trail as the earth is running into it. Thus whatever constellation is generally overhead as the background, before sunrise, will be approximately where the center of the radiant will appear. At different points in the earth's orbit, when the earth intersects the debris trails of various comets, the background constellations overhead just before dawn, and thus the radiant of the meteor showers, will be different.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.99.128.98 (talk) 20:43, 20 October 2009

The following statement is made:

"The radiant must be above the observer's local horizon in order for meteors from that particular shower to be visible."

This is incorrect. When the radiant is on the horizon, half of the overhead sky can show meteors from the shower. When the radiant is below the horizon, less than half can, but not none.

65.101.50.125 (talk) 16:12, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Under Dynamical Evolution... the last para reads:

"When the meteoroids collide with other meteoroids in the zodiacal cloud, they lose their stream association and become part of the "sporadic meteors" background. Long since dispersed from any stream or trail, they form isolated meteors, not a part of any shower. These random meteors will not appear to come from the radiant of the main shower."

This is both essentially incorrect and redundant. Incorrect in that actual meteoroid-meteoroid collisions are vanishingly rare, sporadic meteors arising much much more from unrecognized parent bodies and dynamical/perturbational evolution of stream meteoroid orbits due primarily to the major planets (for example every meteoroid that just misses Earth on one pass - and there are many of these for every one that enters the atmosphere - will be perturbed out of the stream).

65.101.50.125 (talk) 16:40, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

"King of Meteor Showers" Very Questionable
In the notable showers section, describing the leonids is the title "King of Meteor Showers." Being suspicious of this title, I investigated the citation and this title comes from a remark of a single amateur individual with a website. This title, therefore, doesn't really qualify for inclusion in this article and I propose that it be cut. Any opposition? — al-Shimoni  ( talk ) 20:08, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

More Pictures
This article could use some more pictures. All the pictures currently in the article are of comets. There should be some pictures of meteor showers. Would appreciate it if anyone could do this. --174.34.41.239 (talk) 21:33, 11 June 2011 (UTC)J28

Magnitude
There is no mention of their magnitude or brightness. There are about 20 named showers listed, and occasionally they are in the news when should be the time to see them. I have never seen any of those, so how bright these actually are? Can these be seen with naked eye? At least today's news said nothing about needing binoculars. 82.141.72.175 (talk) 21:35, 11 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't know if there is magnitude scale for meteors, but the current Perseid shower is considered "one of the brightest and most prolific meteor showers of the year" according to one source. Obviously best viewed away from city lights and other light pollution, the current shower is unfortunately occurring at the same time of the Supermoon, and we can't do anything about that. -- Racer X11 Talk to me Stalk me  22:31, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Magnitude is uses for individual "things" - stars, planets in the sky, that sort of thing. It is stretched sometimes to speak of the magnitude of a spread out thing like a galaxy or nebula. But the meteor shower is a drawn out event including many meteors. Individual meteors have a magnitude but the over all event just has descriptions of how impressive it is like Racerx11's comments highlight. Smkolins (talk) 17:43, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

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Current state of prediction science
Mention that currently the state of prediction science is not very precise. This often results in many people waiting around all night for events that do not occur. For instance they only see a couple meteors.

See also https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-do-we-predict-meteor-shower-intensity/. Jidanni (talk) 12:40, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

Meteor shower name case
Many meteor showers are named after the Bayer designation of the nearest bright star, to distinguish multiple radiants in the same constellation. This article, most (all?) individual shower articles in Wikipedia, and most literature capitalise the Greek letter (eg. Eta Aquariids). However, see Template:Meteor showers, the main navbox for these pages, where the names have been changed to start with a lowercase letter (eg. eta Aquariids). This has been done because of the usage in an IAU naming group (for example, see https://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2006JIMO...34..127J). The usage of a lowercase Greek letter is not explicitly described anywhere I could find, but the documents and web pages produced by the working group use it consistently. What do you all think? Lithopsian (talk) 15:57, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Doesn't the "Historical developments" section lack of references?
Been reading the article and in the second paragraph there's no references for the statements they are using. Where I can look for the work "Notes upon the astronomical theory of the falling stars"? Hamddan4 (talk) 22:26, 6 October 2022 (UTC)