Do you “wish upon a star” that you had a better way to sync up meteor showers with your busy schedule? … Here’s a great SAS calendar chart that can help!
There’s been a lot of talk about the possible new meteor shower coming up this weekend. The Earth will pass through debris from comet 209P/LINEAR this Friday night and Saturday morning (May 23/24, 2014), and this has the potential to be a spectacular meteor shower (or maybe even a “meteor storm”). Here’s a map I found on dark sky telescope hire), showing where to look in the sky:
And here's my own personal version I created with SAS - pretty nice imitation, eh!?!
I’m doing some volunteer work all day Saturday, and need to be sharp & alert, so I probably won’t be staying up all night to watch this particular meteor shower. But it did get me to wondering which meteor showers might best fit into my busy schedule. And of course I turned to SAS software to answer that question …
I found a list of dates when the meteor showers are predicted to occur (on seasky.org), imported them into a SAS dataset, and plotted them on a custom calendar chart. This way I can easily scan the calendar for meteor showers that occur on Friday or Saturday night (which are the nights that best fit into my schedule). Click the image below to see the interactive ODS HTML output, with hover-text:
What’s the best and most memorable meteor shower you remember watching?
8 Comments
awesome, i had been looking for this quite some time.
now i can make my own availability plots, see http://goo.gl/ixtM8U
Nice!
one more: http://goo.gl/oqzbmW
It appears you're getting the hang of this 'custom graph' stuff! :)
Rob,
That is very cool. Any chance you can post the code for both the map & chart?
Thanks,
Brian Adams
Here's the code for the calendar chart: http://robslink.com/SAS/democd71/meteor_showers_info.htm
I'll have to post the code for the "sky map" later, after I copy it to the external web. But basically it is a blank Proc Gslide, with annotated pies & arrows (for the stars & vector-things), and the gradient background is annotated strips of color (where I mathematically shift from the start color to the end color incrementally).
Thanks again!
As promised, here's a link to the sas code I used to create the "sky map" ... enjoy!
http://robslink.com/SAS/democd71/meteor_map_info.htm