View from the observer onto the Moon (North Pole up). White: illuminated by the Sun. Blue: irradiated by selected meteoroid stream. If no specific stream selected, shows the stream with the highest contribution.
Choose whether you would like to enter the IAU / MDC observatory code or whether you want to manually input the coordinates of your location.
Either you specify all times and get your results as UTC timestamps or whether you would like to use the time zone local to the location you specify.
Depending on whether you choose 'Named Location' or 'Coordinates' as the Location Input Method, enter either the observatory code or the latitude and longitude of the location. In the latter case, you must use a decimal point to separate the decimals.
Either use the calendar widgets or directly type your desired date/time into the field using the format 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM'.
Enter the temporal distance in minutes between the equidistant datapoints at which the given range will be sampled. Be aware that a large numbers of datapoints will take a significant time to compute.
Wait for the computation to complete.
For adequate interpretation of the displayed graphs see below.
See below for a description of the effect of this setting.
Click any datepoint on any of the plots in order to visualize how the Moon will look at the time of the datapoint. For adequate interpretation of the displayed visualization see below.
Download the data computed underlying all plots as a comma-separated text file.
The observability computation requires a numerical approximation.
In order to keep the execution time usable even for larger ranges, the resolution of the approximation is chosen comparatively low.
This is the origin of the noise on the plots; it bears no physical meaning!
In addition, all computed values assume the observer is observing the entire near side of the Moon.
This plot displays the ratio of the expected detection rate of LIFs associated with a meteoroid stream to the expected detection rate of sporadic LIFs at any given moment. The individual contributions to this ratio are plotted on the ABSOLUTE OBSERVABILITY plot.
This plot displays the observability of all contributors to the total observability of LIFs at any given moment. That includes the individual streams (ARI, ETA, GEM, LEO, LYR, NTA, ORI, PER, QUA, SDA) and the sporadic background.
This plot is also the only one affected by the Reference Magnitude setting. When Reference Magnitude fiel is blank, the plot shows a dimensionless Observability. It represents the expected rate of detectable LIFs normalized by a hypothetical case where the entire near side of the Moon is dark and only impacted by sporadic meteoroids, no active stream. When the Reference Magnitude is set, it estimates a detection rate per hour based on the number of LIFs that exceed the given magnitude. However, this conversion is based on very rough approximations, so cannot predict precise rates. It is only meant to give the user a feel for the order of magnitude to expect.
The visualization shows the Moon as seen from the given observer location at time selected by clicking a datapoint on a plot. The North pole of the Moon is oriented straight up. In white, the part of the Moon's surface is shown that is illuminated by the Sun.
The blue area is the part on which the meotoroids associated with the stream can impact the Moon's surface. If the datapoint the user selected represents a specific stream, its radiant is used for the visualization. If the datapoint belongs to a graph to any other graph, the radiant of the stream with the greatest individual contribution at that time is automatically selected. The dark gray area is the dark side of the Moon which the stream does not reach.
This page and the underlying computations were written by André Böddeker under supervision of Prof. Dr. Detlef Koschny at the TUM LPE.