Saturday, December 02, 2017

meteor seasons replotted

With some suggestions from Chris Vaughan, I regenerated my meteor plot chart. In particular, I used a Cauchy distribution formula to calculate intermediate values to the peak.

Cauchy formula

This is much better than my original graph where Excel interpolated the results, given the minimal data, with smoothed lines.

meteors plotted using Cauchy distribution

This effectively shows that meteor showers start slow, slowly build, then, blammo!, there's lots of activity, and then they fall off rapidly.

And, again, the main reason for my making this type of chart was to emphasise our meteor "seasons." Mid-July for a month is a high-water mark with 5 to 6 simultaneous showers. But fall and winter is the best with multiple showers running from mid-October into January plus the two best showers for the whole year.

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