Possible (but unlikely) Leonid Show; Made a Repo for TuxMeteor (Shallow Thoughts)

Possible (but unlikely) Leonid Show; Made a Repo for TuxMeteor

Salon.com had an article predicting a rare Leonid show on Friday and Saturday night this week: Rare "outburst" meteor shower will be visible this weekend.

I'm not sure where they got that idea; more science-leaning resources, like Universe Today and Science Alert, say 2024 is an "off" year for the Leonids, with an expected Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) of 15-20 meteors per hour even with ideal conditions, which we don'e have because of an almost-full moon. There are three other clumps of material from periodic comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle (the source of the Leonids) that we may pass through this year, and it's possible that we may encounter a few more meteors than that predicted ZHR, but it sounds like a long shot. I'll certainly take a look both Friday and Saturday nights, if we have clear skies, but I'm not planning to stay up into the wee hours in the hope of a Leonid outburst.

And indeed, though I did check outside briefly both nights, the glare from the bright moon reflecting off a hazy sky hid stars fainter than about second magnitude, and I didn't see a single meteor.

But thinking about the night Dave and I saw the Leonid storm (I think it was 2001, though I'm having trouble confirming that) — I recounted the story in an older article about another meteor shower prediction that didn't work out — reminded me of the meteor-counting program, TuxMeteor, that I hastily hacked up in the few days preceding the Leonid storm..

It turned out that although I had links to TuxMeteor tarballs on my website, I never made a repository for it on GitHub. So I made one, checked in the old code, and did a few minor tweaks (modern gcc throws a lot of warnings that the older one didn't, and I hate warnings).

In the unlikely event that you want to use a Linux laptop to count meteors for this year's Leonids, you can now check it out from GitHub: TuxMeteor on GitHub.