Talk:Radiant (meteor shower)

TODO
Items that I think should be added, but I did not follow up on when creating the page: Anything else anyone thinks should be expanded? -Harmil 15:26, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Measurement - Typical ways in which the radiant is measured in both astronomical and general public publications.
 * Examples - A section with examples of the radiants of the largest showers would be nice.
 * Diagram - If there's a good, PD or otherwise usable diagram out there that shows the radiant of a shower, that would be great. I'll search for this later.

No good pictures
Strike that theory that I'd find a good PD picture. There's nothing that I can find that has the properties of being PD or otherwise free and would actually make a good illustration for the concept. There are plenty of NASA drawings that show where a radiant is for a given shower, but that's not going to illustrate the idea that meteors can be anywhere, they just have to "point to" the radiant. And, none of the actual sky shots that I can find are all that good when scaled down.

I'm going to see if I can get a good image this weekend, and if I can, I'll upload it under an appropriate license. -Harmil 20:40, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

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Question about radiant direction
I came here looking for an explanation of the location of the radiant and didn't quite get it. The "Cause" section says "This dust continues to move along the comet's wake, and when the Earth moves through such debris, a meteor shower results. Because all of the debris is moving in roughly the same direction, the meteors which strike the atmosphere all "point" back to the direction of the comet's path." But isn't the motion of the Earth relative to the comet debris trail faster than the motion of the debris trail relative to the sun? And in that case the radiant would mainly be along a line tangent to the Earth's orbit at the time of that particular meteor shower? Also, if the radiant were caused by the motion of the debris trail, how could the debris trail be moving so much more slowly than the comet pass that left it, that a meteor shower would recur every year for decades or centuries? Also it's not clear to me whether a given recurring meteor shower is caused by a single previous pass of a comet that happens to intersect Earth's orbit, or multiple previous passes of that comet. Thanks for any elucidation. Mark Taylor (talk) 21:51, 23 April 2019 (UTC)