view meteor streams

Learned of an online interactive visual product for meteor showers. It lets you pick a particular meteor shower (from a list with about a dozen), zoom in and out, move above or below the ecliptic, and control a few other settings.

Very nice.

It also highlighted another aspect of meteors I had not considered before. In the dynamical system, the old cometary material is still moving.

When considering meteor showers of late, I've wondered how they change from year to year. A factor would be that the Earth punches a hole through the old comet stream. I also imagined that many particles would get caught in gravitational wake and would follow along forever behind us.