Scenes · Study 085
Meteor Shower
A clear night sky with twinkling stars, invented constellations and meteors streaking down from a single radiant. Click to send one yourself.
What you're looking at
The stars are fixed points whose brightness wobbles slightly. A few of the brighter ones are joined into made up constellations by linking each to its nearest neighbours. Meteors start near one point in the upper sky and travel outward from it, each with a bright head and a tail that fades behind.
The idea behind it
Real shower meteors appear to fan out from one spot, the radiant, for the same reason parallel railway tracks seem to spread from the horizon. The grains are travelling side by side as Earth ploughs through a comet's dust trail. Most are no bigger than a grain of sand and burn up about a hundred kilometres overhead.
Try this
Click or tap to launch a meteor through that point in the sky.
