Tux Meteor

The idea is, while you're lounging on a lawn chair watching the show with a nice warm blanket over you, you put your laptop in your lap (thus helping to warm your lap, under the blanket so the bright CRT doesn't destroy everyone's night vision) and click mouse buttons or keys on the keyboard every time you see a meteor. These events all get logged to a file, so you can take the data later and make a graph of meteor frequency vs. time, or whatever.

Tux Meteor can now run as a console app, without X. This saves batteries on some laptops, and also should make it much more portable to non-X platforms such as OS X or Zaurus.

Download the tarball here: tuxmeteor-0.4.tar.gz.

It logs the time of each meteor, and which key or button was used to log it, so you can use different keys/buttons for different brightnesses or parts of the sky.

The log file is $HOME/.tuxmeteor/meteors

When you run tuxmeteor, q will quit; any other key or mouse button will count as a meteor.

Here is a python script which can take the output and turn it into a file suitable for passing to gnuplot. (Run meteor2plot.py binsize filename)

Here are some plots from Tux Meteor data.

Installing

TuxMeteor is now on GitHub. You can check it out from there, or extract the tarball below.

Either way, type make and hopefully it will build. The binary is called tuxmeteor; you can run it from the build directory, or run make install to install it to /usr/local/bin.

Changelog

11/30/2002, Tux Meteor 0.4:

Add terminal handling, smarter Makefile.

11/18/2002, Tux Meteor 0.1:

Initial release, for the Leonids.