38. Lunar temperature modulation

Let’s start with a graph.

Latitude averaged temperature anomalies versus date

Graph of latitude averaged temperature anomalies (in degrees Celsius), from 1 April 1986 to 31 March 1987. (Figure reproduced from [1].)

This graph shows temperature anomalies on Earth – that is, the difference between the recorded temperature on any given day and the average temperature for the same location on that day over many years. Yellow-red colours indicate the actual temperature was warmer than average, blue-green colours indicate the temperature was cooler than average. The results are averaged across latitudes, so each point on the graph shows the average anomaly for the entire circle of latitude. The data are Goddard Television Infrared Observation Satellite Operational Vertical Sounder surface air temperature readings from NOAA polar weather satellites.

As you might expect, the temperature across Earth varies a bit. Some days are a bit warmer than average and some a bit cooler than average. You might imagine that with all of the different effects that go into the complicated atmospherical systems that control our weather, days would be cooler or warmer than average pretty much at random.

However that’s not what we’re seeing here. There’s a pattern to the anomalies. Firstly, the anomalies in the polar regions are larger (red and dark blue) than the anomalies in the mid-latitudes and tropic (yellow and light blue). Secondly, there are hints of almost regular vertical stripes in the graph – alternating bands of yellow and blue in the middle, and alternating red and dark blue near the poles. If you look at the graph carefully, you may be able to pick out a pattern of higher and lower temperatures, with a period a little bit less than one month.

What could have an effect on the Earth’s climate with a period a little under a month? The answer is, somewhat astonishingly, the moon.

The creators of this graph took the latitude-averaged temperature anomaly data for the 20 years from 1979 to 1998, and plotted it as a function of the phase of the moon:

Latitude averaged temperature anomalies versus lunar phase

Graph of latitude averaged temperature anomalies (in degrees Celsius), from 1979 to 1998, plotted against phase of the moon. (a) annual average, (b) October-March (northern winter), (c) April-September (northern summer). (Figure reproduced from [1].)

These graphs show that the temperature anomalies have a clear relationship to the phase of the moon. In the polar regions, the temperature anomaly is strongly positive around the full moon, and negative around the new moon. In the mid-latitudes and tropics the trend is not so strong, but the anomalies tend to be lower around the full moon and positive around the new moon – the opposite of the polar regions.

What on Earth is going on here?

Aggregated measurements show that the polar latitudes of Earth are systematically around 0.55 degrees Celsius warmer at the full moon than at the new moon. This effect is strong enough that it dominates over the weaker reverse effect of the mid-latitudes/tropics anomaly. The average temperature of the Earth across all latitudes is not constant – it varies with the phase of the moon, dominated by the polar anomalies, being 0.02 degrees Celsius warmer at the full moon than the new moon. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but the signal is consistently there over all sub-periods in the 20-year data, and it is highly statistically significant.

The next puzzle is: What could possibly cause the Earth’s average temperature to vary with the phase of the moon?

Well, the full moon is bright, whereas the new moon is dark. Could the moonlight be warming the Earth measurably? Physicist and climate scientist Robert S. Knox has done the calculations. It turns out that the additional visible and thermal radiation the Earth receives from the full moon is only enough to warm the Earth by 0.0007 degrees Celsius, nowhere near enough to account for the observed difference[2].

There’s another effect of the moon’s regular orbit around the Earth. According to Newton’s law of gravity, strictly speaking the moon does not move in an orbit around the centre of the Earth. Two massive bodies in an orbital relationship actually each orbit around the centre of mass of the system, known as the barycentre. When one body is much more massive than the other, for example an artificial satellite orbiting the Earth, the motion of the larger body is very small. But our moon is over 1% of the mass of the Earth, so the barycentre of the system is over 1% of the distance from the centre of the Earth to the centre of the moon.

It turns out the Earth-moon barycentre is 4670 km from the centre of the Earth. This is still inside the Earth, but almost 3/4 of the way to the surface.

Animation of lunar orbit

Animation showing the relative positions of the Earth and moon during the lunar orbital cycle. The red cross is the barycentre of the Earth-moon system, and both bodies orbit around it. Diagram is not to scale: relative to the Earth the moon is actually a bit larger than that (1/4 the diameter), and much further away (30× the Earth’s diameter). (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The result of this is that during a full moon, when the moon is farthest from the sun, the Earth is 4670 km closer to the sun than average, whereas during a new moon the Earth is 4670 km further away from the sun than average. The Earth oscillates over 9000 km towards and away from the sun every month. And the increase in incident radiation from the sun during the phases around the full moon comes to about 43 mW per square metre, or an extra 5450 GW over the entire Earth. The Earth normally receives nearly 44 million GW of solar radiation, so the difference is relatively small, but it’s enough to heat the Earth by almost 0.01 degrees Celsius, which is near the observed average monthly temperature variation.

Why are the polar regions so strongly affected by this lunar cycle, while the tropics are weakly affected, and even show an opposing trend? Earth’s weather systems are complex and involve transport of heat across the globe by moving air masses. The burst of heat at the poles during a full moon actually migrates towards lower latitudes over several days – you can see the trend in the slope of the warm parts of the graph. The exact details of the physical mechanisms for these observations are still under discussion by the experts. What is clear though is that there is a definite cycle in the Earth’s average temperature with a period equal to the orbit of the moon, and it is most likely driven by the fact that the Earth is closer to the sun during a full moon.

How might one possibly explain this in a flat Earth model? Well, the “orbital” mechanics are completely different. The phase of the moon should have no effect on the distance of the Earth to the sun. The only moderately sensible idea might be that the full moon emits enough extra radiation to warm up the Earth. But the observations of the moon’s radiant energy and the amount of heating it can supply end up the same as the round Earth case (if you believe the same laws of thermodynamics). The full moon simply doesn’t supply anywhere near enough extra heat to the flat Earth to account for the observations.

One could posit that the sun varies in altitude above the flat Earth, coincidentally with the same period as the moon, thus providing additional heating during the full moon. However one of the main modifications to the geometry of the Earth-sun system made in flat Earth models is to fix the sun at a given distance (usually a few thousand kilometres) above the surface of the Earth, in an attempt to explain various geometrical properties such as the angle of the sun as seen from different latitudes. Letting the sun move up and down would mess up the geometry, and should easily be observable from the surface of the flat Earth.

So, observations of the global average temperature, and its periodic variation with the phase of the moon provides another proof that the Earth is a globe.

References:

[1] Anyamba, E.K., Susskind, J. “Evidence of lunar phase influence on global surface air temperature”. Geophysical Research Letters, 27(18), p.2969-2972, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1029/2000GL011651

[2] Knox, R.S. “Physical aspects of the greenhouse effect and global warming”. American Journal of Physics, 67(12), p.1227-1238, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.19109

37. Sundials

The earliest method of marking time during the day was by following the movements of the sun as it crossed the sky, from sunrise in the east to sunset in the west. The apparent motion of the sun makes the shadows of fixed objects move during the day too. If you poke a stick into the ground, the shadow of the stick moves across the ground as time passes. By making marks on the ground and seeing which one the shadow is near, you get a method of telling the time of day. This is a simple form of sundial.

The apparent motion of the sun in the sky is caused by the interaction between the Earth’s orbit around the sun and the rotation of the Earth on its axis, which is inclined at approximately 23.5° to the axis of the orbital plane. At the June solstice (roughly 21 June), the northern hemisphere is maximally pointed towards the sun, making it summer while the southern hemisphere has winter. Half a year later at the December solstice, the sun is on the other side of the Earth, making it summer in the south and winter in the north. Midway between the solstices, at the March and September equinoxes, both hemispheres receive the same amount of sun.

The seasons

Diagram of the interaction between Earth’s orbit and its tilted axis of rotation, showing the solstices and equinoxes that generate the seasons.

From the point of view of an observer standing on the Earth’s surface, the motions of the Earth make it appear as though the sun moves across the sky once per day, and drifts slowly north and south throughout the year. The following diagram shows the path of the sun across the sky for different dates, for my home of Sydney (latitude 34°S).

Sun’s path across the sky

Sun’s path across the sky for different dates at latitude 34°S. (Diagram produced using [1].)

In the diagram, the horizon is around the edge, and the centre of the circles is directly overhead. The blue lines show the sun’s path for the indicated dates of the year. The sun is lowest in the sky to the north, and visible for the shortest time, on the June solstice (the southern winter), while it is highest in the sky and visible for the longest on the December solstice (in summer). The red lines show the position of the sun along each arc at the labelled hour of the day. For a location in the northern hemisphere north of the tropics, the sun paths would be curved the other way, passing south of overhead. In the tropics (between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer), some paths are to the north while some are to the south. On the equinoxes (20 March and 21 September), the sun rises due east at 06:00 and sets due west at 18:00 – this is true for every latitude.

If you have a fixed object cast a shadow, that shadow moves throughout the course of a day. The next day, if the sun has moved north or south because of the slowly changing seasons, the path the shadow traces moves a little bit above or below the previous day’s path.

The ancient Babylonians and Egyptians used sundials, and the ancient Greeks used their knowledge of geometry to develop several different styles. Greek sundials typically used a point-like object, called the nodus, as the reference marker. The nodus could be the very tip of a stick, a small ball or disc supported by thin wires, or a small hole that lets a spot of sunlight through. The shadow of the nodus (or the spot of light in the case of a hole nodus) moves across a surface in a regular way, not just with time of day, but also with the day of the year. During the day, the point-like shadow of a nodus traces a path from west to east (as the sun moves east to west in the sky). Throughout the year, the daily path moves north and south as the sun moves further south or north in the sky due to the seasons.

ALT TEXT

A nodus-based sundial, on St. Mary’s Basilica, Kraków, Poland. The nodus is a small hole in the centre of the cross. The horizontal position of the spot of light in the centre of the cross’s shadow indicates a time of just after 1:45 pm; the vertical position indicates the date (as indicated by the astrological symbols on the sides). It could be either about 1/3 of the way into the sign of Gemini (about 31 May), or 2/3 of the way through Cancer (about 12 July). The EXIF data on the photo indicates it was taken on 16 July, so the nodus date is fairly accurate. This sundial is mounted on a vertical wall, not horizontally, so the shadow travels left to right in the northern hemisphere, rather than right to left as it does for a horizontal sundial. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

There are two slight complications. The red lines in the sun’s path diagram show timing of the sun paths assuming the Earth’s orbit is perfectly circular, but in reality it is an ellipse, with the Earth nearest the sun in January and furthest away in June. Earth travels around that elliptical path at different speeds—due to Newton’s law of gravity and laws of motion—moving fastest at closest approach in January, and slowest in June. The result of this is that the daily interval between when the sun crosses the north-south line is 24 hours on average, but varies systematically through the year. This variation in the sun’s apparent motion has a period of one year.

The second complication occurs because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis to the ecliptic plane in which it orbits. The sun’s apparent movement in the sky is due west (parallel to the Earth’s equator) only at the equinoxes. On any other date it moves at an angle, with a component of motion north or south, as it moves up or down the sky with the seasons. This north-south motion is maximal at the solstices. So at the solstices the westward component of the sun’s motion is less than it is at the equinoxes, meaning that it appears to move westward across the sky more slowly (because part of its speed is being used to move north or south). This variation in the sun’s apparent motion has a period of half a year.

To get the total variation in the sun’s motion, we need to add these two components. Doing so gives us the equation of time. This is the amount of time by which the sun’s position varies from the ideal “circular orbit, non-inclined axial spin” case, as a function of the day of the year.

The equation of time

The equation of time (red), showing the two components that make it up: the component due to Earth’s elliptical orbit (blue dashed line) and the component caused by the Earth’s axial tilt (green dot-dash line). The total shows the number of minutes that the sun’s apparent motion is ahead of its average position.

What this means is that if you have a standard sort of simple sundial, the shadow moves at different speeds across the face on different dates of the year, resulting in the shadow getting a little bit ahead or a little bit behind clock time. To get the correct time as shown by a clock, you need to read the time off the sundial’s shadow and subtract the number of minutes given by the equation of time for that date.

But this is thinking about sundials with our modern mindest about how time works. We have decided to make the unit of time we call a “day” the average length of time that it takes the sun to return to its highest position in the sky, and then we’ve divided that day into 24 exactly equal hours. An hour on 20 March is exactly the same length as an hour on 21 June, or on 21 December. “Of course it is!” you say.

But it wasn’t always so. For most of history, a “day” was defined as either the time between one sunrise and the next, or one sunset and the next, or the time between when the sun was due south in the sky and when it returned to being due south again (in the northern hemisphere). Each of these definitions of a “day” vary in length throughout the year. Saudi Arabia officially used Arabic time up until 1968, which defined midnight (the start of a new day) to be at sunset each day, and clocks needed to be adjusted every day to track the shift in sunset through the seasons.

The definition of a day as the period between the sun being due south (or north) and returning to that position the next day, is called solar time. For most of human timekeeping history, this is what was used. The fact that some days were a bit longer or shorter than others was of no consequence when the sun itself was the best timekeeping tool that anyone had access to.

Our modern concept of an hour has its origins in ancient Egypt, around 2,500 BC. The Egyptians originally divided the night time period into 12 parts, marked by the rising of particular stars in the sky. Because the stars change with the seasons (as discussed in 36. The visible stars), they had tables of which stars marked which hours for different dates of the year. Because of precession of the Earth’s orbit, the stars fell out of synch with the tables over the course of several centuries.

The oldest non-sundial timekeeping device that still exists is a water clock dating from the reign of Amenhotep III, around 1350 BC. It was a conical bowl, which was filled with water at sunset, and had a small outflow drip hole that let water out at a roughly constant rate. Inside the bowl is a set of 12 level marks, showing the water level at each of the 12 divisions of the night. But not just one set of 12 marks – there are multiple sets of 12 markings, with different spacings, that show the passage of the night time hours for different months of the year, when the length of the night is different.

Egyptian water clock

Ancient Egyptian water clock (not Amenhotep’s one mentioned in the text). Dating uncertain, but possibly a much later Roman-era piece (circa 30 BC). The lower panel shows an unrolled cast of the interior of the conical bowl, showing the 12 different vertical rows of 12 differently spaced holes, indicating variable length hours for different months of the year. (Figure reproduced from [2].)

The oldest sundial we have is also from ancient Egypt, dating from around 1500 BC, a piece of limestone with a hole bored in it for a stick, and shadow marks, 12 of them, for dividing the daylight hours into 12 parts.

Ancient Egyptian sundial

Ancient Egyptian sundial, circa 1500 BC, found in the Valley of the Kings. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

So the ancient Egyptians were dividing both the daylight and night time parts of each day into 12 different-length parts for a total of 24 divisions. Through cultural contact, sundials became a common way to mark the 12 hours of daylight in many other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilisations too, including the ancient Greeks and Romans.

By the Middle Ages, Catholic Europe was still keeping time based on a division of daylight time into 12 variable-length hours, and this carried across to the canonical hours, marking the times of day for liturgical prayers:

  • Matins: the night time prayer, recited some time after midnight, but before dawn.
  • Lauds: the dawn prayer, taking place at first light.
  • Prime: recited during the first hour of daylight.
  • Terce: at the third hour of the day time.
  • Sext: at midday, at the sixth hour, when the sun is due south.
  • Nones: the ninth hour of the day time.
  • Vespers: the sunset prayer, at the twelfth hour of the daylight period.
  • Compline: the end of the working day prayer, just before bed time.

In the modern world we might interpret “the third hour” to be 9:00 am, halfway between 6:00 am and midday, but the canonical hours are guided by the sun, so Terce would be earlier in summer and later in winter, in the same way that sunrise, and hence the celebration of Lauds, are. Nones, in contrast, would be earlier in winter and later in summer. (Incidentally, we get our modern word “noon” from “Nones” – although you’ll notice that Nones was defined as the ninth hour, or around 3:00 pm. For some reason it moved to become associated with the middle of the day. We’re not sure exactly why, but historians believe that the monks who observed this liturgy fasted each day until after the prayer of Nones, so there was constant pressure to make it slightly earlier, which eventually moved it back a full three hours!)

You might think that when mechanical clocks were invented, people suddenly realised that they’d been doing things wrong the whole time, and they quickly moved to the modern system of an hour being of a constant length. But that’s not what happened. The first mechanical clocks used a verge escapement to regulate the motion of the gear wheels, and this remained the most accurate clock mechanism from the 13th century to the 17th. But it wasn’t very accurate, varying by around 15 minutes per day, and so verge clocks had to be reset daily to match the motion of the sun.

Salisbury Cathedral clock

Verge escapement clock at Salisbury Cathedral (circa 1386). (My photo.)

Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1656, vastly improving the accuracy of mechanical clocks, down to around 15 seconds per day. With this new level of accuracy, people fully realised for the first time that the length of a full day as measured by the time it took the sun to return to the highest position in the sky didn’t match a regularly ticking clock. But rather than adjust their definition of what an hour was, people decided there must be a way to get these regular clocks to tell proper solar time! Thus were invented equation clocks.

The first equation clocks had a correction dial, which essentially displayed the equation of time value for the current day of the year. You read the time off the main clock dial, and then added the correction displayed on the correction dial, and that gave you the “correct” solar time. By the 18th century, the correction gearing was incorporated into the main clock face display, so that the hands of the clock actually ran faster or slower at different times of the year, to match the movement of the sun. It wasn’t until the early 19th century that European society moved to a mean time system (“mean” as in “average”), in which each “day” was defined to be exactly the same length, and the hour was a fixed period of time (thus simplifying clockmakers’ lives considerably).

Just to complete this story, clocks in the early 19th century were set to local mean time, which was the mean time of their meridian of longitude. Towns a few tens of miles east or west would have different mean times by a few minutes. This caused problems beginning with the introduction of rapid travel enabled by the railways, eventually leading to the adoption of standard time zones in the 1880s, in which all locations in slices of roughly 1/24 of the Earth share the same time.

What this means is that people were still living their lives by local solar time up until the early 19th century. In other words, a sundial was still the most accurate method of telling the time up until just 200 years ago – and it didn’t need any corrections based on the equation of time because people weren’t using mean time yet. It’s only in the past 200 years that we’ve had to correct a sundial to give what we consider to be the correct clock time.

So, back to sundials. Assuming we are happy with solar time (and can use the equation of time to correct to mean time if we wish), the main thing we need to contend with is that the sun moves north and south in the sky throughout the year. A nodus-type sundial accounts for this by marking lines that indicate the time when the shadow of the nodus crosses them on different days of the year. But many sundials use the whole edge of a stick or post as the shadow marker – this edge is called the gnomon. As the sun moves north and south throughout the year, different parts of the gnomon will cast their shadows in different places. If the gnomon is aligned parallel to the axis of the Earth, then these motions will be along the edge of the shadow, rather shifting the edge of the shadow laterally. You can then read solar time using a single marking, at any time of the year.

Another way to think about it is that from a viewpoint on Earth, the sun appears to revolve in the sky about the Earth’s axis. So if your sundial has a gnomon that is parallel to the Earth’s axis, the sun appears to rotate with the gnomon as its axis once per day, and the shadow of the gnomon indicates solar time on the marked surface below. As the sun moves north or south with the seasons, it is still revolving around the gnomon, so the shadow still tracks solar time accurately. If the gnomon is not parallel to the revolution axis, then as the sun moves north and south, the shadow of the gnomon will shift positions on the marked surface, and the time will be inaccurate at different times of the year.

This is why sundials with gnomons all have them inclined at an angle from the horizontal equal to the latitude of where the sundial is placed. At the North Pole, a vertical stick will indicate solar time accurately throughout the entire summer (when the sun is above the horizon 24 hours a day). At London (latitude 51.5°N), sundial gnomons are pointed north at 51.5° from the horizontal.

Sundial in London

A sundial in London. The gnomon is inclined at 51.5° to the horizontal. (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic image by Maxwell Hamilton, from Wikimedia Commons.)

At Perth, Australia (32°S), they point south and are 32° from the horizontal, noticeably flatter.

Sundial in Perth

A sundial in Perth, Australia. The gnomon is noticeably at a flatter angle than sundials in London. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

A sundial on the equator must have a gnomon that is horizontal.

Sundial in Singapore

A sundial in Singapore (latitude 1.3°N). The gnomon is the thin bar, angled at 1.3° to the horizontal. North is to the left. The sun shines from the north in June, from the south in December, but the shadow of the bar tracks the hours on the semicircular scale correctly at each date. (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic image by Michael Coghlan, from Wikimedia Commons.)

So, in order to work properly, gnomon-sundials must have a gnomon angled parallel to the Earth’s axis of rotation. The fact that sundials at different latitudes need to have their gnomons at different angles to the ground plane shows that the ground plane is only perpendicular to the Earth’s rotation axis at the North and South Poles, and the angle between the ground and Earth’s axis of rotation varies everywhere else in a way consistent with the Earth being a globe.

If the Earth were flat… well, all of this would just be a huge coincidence in the motion of the sun above the flat Earth, that for some unexplained reason exactly mimics the geometry of a spherical Earth in orbit about the sun. In fact, to get all of the angles to match sundial observations you need to posit that the sun’s rays don’t even travel in straight lines.

Addendum: I just wanted to show you this magnificent sundial, in the Monastery of Lluc, in Mallorca, Spain.

Sundial in the Monastery of Lluc

This sundial has five separate faces:

Top left shows the canonical hours. At sunrise (no matter what time sunrise happens to be), the shadow of the stick indicates the liturgy of Prime. Sext occurs at solar noon, when the sun is directly overhead, with Terce halfway between Prime and Sext. Vespers is at sunset (again, regardless of the modern clock time), with Nones halfway between Sext and Vespers. The night time hours of Complice, Matins, and Lauds are marked above the horizontal (and in fact would correctly indicate the times if the Earth were transparent, so the sun could cast a shadow from underneath the horizon).

Bottom left shows a nodus sundial, the tip of the stick marking “Babylonian” hours, which were used in Mallorca historically. This counts 0 (or 24) at sunrise, and then equal numbered hours thereafter. The vertical position of the nodus shadow marks the date (similar to the Krakow sundial above).

The central dial is a gnomon indicating “true solar time”. The shadow of the edge of the gnomon indicates the solar hour.

Finally the two dials on the right are nodus dials, showing mean time horizontally, and date of the year vertically. The top dial is to be read in summer and autumn, whole the lower dial is for winter and spring. It looks like the dials also include a daylight saving adjustment, assuming it begins and ends on the equinoxes!

The time (confirmed from the photo EXIF data) is 4:15 pm, and the date is 9 September, 12 days before the autumnal equinox (read on the top right dial).

References:

[1] “Polar sun path chart program”, University of Oregon Solar Radiation Monitoring Laboratory. http://solardat.uoregon.edu/PolarSunChartProgram.html

[2] Ritner, Robert. “Oriental Institute Museum Notes 16: Two Egyptian Clepsydrae (OIM E16875 and A7125)”. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 75, p. 361-389, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1086/687296

21. Zodiacal light

Brian May is best known as the guitarist of the rock band Queen.[1] The band formed in 1970 with four university students: May, drummer Roger Taylor (not the drummer Roger Taylor who later played for Duran Duran), singer Farrokh “Freddie” Bulsara, and bassist Mike Grose, playing their first gig at Imperial College in London on 18 July. Freddie soon changed his surname to Mercury, and after trying a few other bass players the band settled on John Deacon.

Brian May 1972

Brian May, student, around 1972, with some equipment related to his university studies. (Reproduced from [2].)

While May continued his studies, the fledgling band recorded songs, realeasing a debut self-titled album, Queen, in 1973. It had limited success, but they followed up with two more albums in 1974: Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack. These met with much greater success, reaching numbers 5 and 2 on the UK album charts respectively. With this commercial success, Brian May decided to drop his academic ambitions, leaving his Ph.D. studies incomplete. Queen would go on to become one of the most successful bands of all time.

Lead singer Freddie Mercury died of complications from AIDS in 1991. This devastated the band and they stopped performing and recording for some time. In 1994 they released a final studio album, consisting of reworked material recorded by Mercury before he died plus some new recording to fill gaps. And since then May and Taylor have performed occasional concerts with guest singers, billed as Queen + (singer).

The down time and the wealth accumulated over a successful music career allowed Brian May to apply to resume his Ph.D. studies in 2006. He first had to catch up on 33 years of research in his area of study, then complete his experimental work and write up his thesis. He submitted it in 2007 and graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy in the field of astrophysics in 2008.

Brian May 2008

Dr Brian May, astrophysicist, in 2008. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

May’s thesis was titled: A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.[2] May was able to catch up and complete his thesis because the zodiacal dust cloud is a relatively neglected topic in astrophysics, and there was only a small amount of research done on it in the intervening years.

We’ve already met the zodiacal dust cloud (which is also known as the interplanetary dust cloud). It is a disc of dust particles ranging from 10 to 100 micrometres in size, concentrated in the ecliptic plane, the plane of orbit of the planets. Backscattered reflection off this disc of dust particles causes the previously discussed gegenschein phenomenon, visible as a glow in the night sky at the point directly opposite the sun (i.e. when the sun is hidden behind the Earth).

But that’s not the only visible evidence of the zodiacal dust cloud. As stated in the proof using gegenschein:

Most of the light is scattered by very small angles, emerging close to the direction of the original incoming beam of light. As the scattering angle increases, less and less light is scattered in those directions. Until you reach a point somewhere around 90°, where the scattering is a minimum, and then the intensity of scattered light starts climbing up again as the angle continues to increase. It reaches its second maximum at 180°, where light is reflected directly back towards the source.

This implies that there should be another maximum of light scattered off the zodiacal dust cloud, along lines of sight close to the sun. And indeed there is. It is called the zodiacal light. The zodiacal light was first described scientifically by Giovanni Cassini in 1685[3], though there is some evidence that the phenomenon was known centuries earlier.

Title page of Cassini's discovery

Title page of Cassini’s discovery announcement of the zodiacal light. (Reproduced from [3].)

Unlike gegenschein, which is most easily seen high overhead at midnight, the zodiacal light is best seen just after sunset or just before dawn, because it appears close to the sun. The zodiacal light is a broad, roughly triangular band of light which is broadest at the horizon, narrowing as it extends up into the sky along the ecliptic plane. The broad end of the zodiacal light points directly towards the direction of the sun below the horizon. This in itself provides evidence that the sun is in fact below the Earth’s horizon at night.

zodiacal light at Paranal

Zodiacal light seen from near the tropics, Paranal Observatory, Chile. Note the band of light is almost vertical. (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International image by ESO/Y.Beletsky, from Wikimedia Commons.)

The zodiacal light is most easily seen in the tropics, because, as Brian May writes: “it is here that the cone of light is inclined at a high angle to the horizon, making it still visible when the Sun is well below the horizon, and the sky is completely dark.”[2] This is because the zodiacal dust is concentrated in the plane of the ecliptic, so the reflected sunlight forms an elongated band in the sky, showing the plane of the ecliptic, and the ecliptic is at a high, almost vertical angle, when observed from the tropics.

zodiacal light at Washington

Zodiacal light observed from a mid-latitude, Washington D.C., sketched by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot in 1876. The band of light is inclined at an angle. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Unlike most other astronomical phenomena, this shows us in a single glance the position of a well-defined plane in space. From tropical regions, we can see that the plane is close to vertical with respect to the ground. At mid-latitudes, the plane of the zodiacal light is inclined closer to the ground plane. And at polar latitudes the zodiacal light is almost parallel to the ground. These observations show that at different latitudes the surface of the Earth is inclined at different angles to a visible reference plane in the sky. The Earth’s surface must be curved (in fact spherical) for this to be so.

zodiacal light from Europe

Zodiacal light observed from higher latitude, in Europe. The band of light is inclined at an even steeper angle. (Public domain image reproduced from [4].)

[I could not find a good royalty-free image of the zodiacal light from near-polar latitudes, but here is a link to copyright image on Flickr, taken from Kodiak, Alaska. Observe that the band of the zodiacal light (at left) is inclined at more than 45° from the vertical. https://www.flickr.com/photos/photonaddict/39974474754/ ]

zodiacal light at Mauna Kea

Zodiacal light seen over the Submillimetre Array at Mauna Kea Observatories. (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International by Steven Keys and keysphotography.com, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Furthermore, at mid-latitudes the zodiacal light is most easily observed at different times in the different hemispheres, and these times change with the date during the year. Around the March equinox, the zodiacal light is best observed from the northern hemisphere after sunset, while it is best observed from the southern hemisphere before dawn. However around the September equinox it is best observed from the northern hemisphere before dawn and from the southern hemisphere after sunset. It is less visible in both hemispheres at either of the solstices.

seasonal variation in zodiacal light from Tenerife

Seasonal variation in visibility of the zodiacal light, as observed by Brian May from Tenerife in 1971. The horizontal axis is day of the year. The central plot shows time of night on the vertical axis, showing periods of dark night sky (blank areas), twilight (horizontal hatched bands), and moonlight (vertical hatched bands). The upper plot shows the angle of inclination of the ecliptic (and hence the zodiacal light) at dawn, which is a maximum of 87° on the September equinox, and a minimum of 35° on the March equinox. The lower plot shows the angle of inclination of the ecliptic at sunset, which is a maximum of 87° on the March equinox. (Reproduced from [2].)

This change in visibility is because of the relative angles of the Earth’s surface to the plane of the dust disc. At the March equinox, northern mid-latitudes are closest to the ecliptic at local sunset, but far from the ecliptic at dawn, while southern mid-latitudes are close to the ecliptic at dawn and far from it at sunset. The situation is reversed at the September equinox. At the solstices, mid-latitudes in both hemispheres are at intermediate positions relative to the ecliptic.

seasonal variation of Earth with respect to ecliptic

Diagram of the Earth’s tilt relative to the ecliptic, showing how different latitudes are further from or closer to the ecliptic at certain times of year and day.

So the different seasonal visibility and angles of the zodiacal light are also caused by the fact that the Earth is spherical, and inclined at an angle to the ecliptic plane. This natural explanation does not carry over to a flat Earth model, and none of the observations of the zodiacal light have any simple explanation.

References:

[1] Google search, “what is brian may famous for”, https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+brian+may+famous+for (accessed 2019-07-23).

[2] May, B. H. A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud. Ph.D. thesis, Imperial College London, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-0-387-77706-1

[3] Cassini, G. D. “Découverte de la lumière celeste qui paroist dans le zodiaque” (“Discovery of the celestial light that resides in the zodiac”). De l’lmprimerie Royale, par Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy, Paris, 1685. https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-7552

[4] Guillemin, A. Le Ciel Notions Élémentaires D’Astronomie Physique, Libartie Hachette et Cie, Paris, 1877. https://books.google.com/books?id=v6V89Maw_OAC

20. Rocket launch sites

Suppose you are planning to build an orbital rocket launching facility. Where are you going to put it? There are several issues to consider.

  • You want the site to be on politically friendly and stable territory. This strongly biases you to building it in your own country, or a dependent territory. Placing it close to an existing military facility is also useful for logistical reasons, especially if any of the space missions are military in nature.
  • You want to build it far enough away from population centres that if something goes catastrophically wrong there will be minimal damage and casualties, but not so far away that it is logistically difficult to move equipment and personnel there.
  • You want to place the site to take advantage of the fact that the rocket begins its journey with the momentum it has from standing on the ground as the Earth rotates. This is essentially a free boost to its launch speed. Since the Earth rotates west to east, the rocket stationary on the pad relative to the Earth actually begins with a significant momentum in an easterly direction. Rocket engineers would be crazy to ignore this.

One consequence of the rocket’s initial momentum is that it’s much easier to launch a rocket towards the east than towards the west. Launching towards the east, you start with some bonus velocity in the same direction, and so your rocket can get away with being less powerful than otherwise. This represents a serious saving in cost and construction difficulty. If you were to launch a rocket towards the west, you’d have to engineer it to be much more powerful, since it first has to overcome its initial eastward velocity, and then generate the entirety of the westward velocity from scratch. So virtually no rockets are ever launched towards the west. Rockets are occasionally launched to the north or south to put their payloads into polar orbits, but most are placed into so-called near-equatorial orbits that travel substantially west-to-east.

In turn, this means that when selecting a launch site, you want to choose a place where the territory to the eastern side of the site is free of population centres, again to avoid disaster if something goes wrong during a launch. The easiest way to achieve this is to place your launch site on the eastern coast of a landmass, so the rockets launch out over the ocean, though you can also do it if you can find a large unpopulated region and place your launch site near the western side.

When we look at the major rocket launch facilities around the world, they generally follow these principles. The Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral is acceptably near Orlando, Florida, but far enough away to avoid disasters, and adjacent to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for military logistics. It launches east over the Atlantic Ocean.

Kennedy Space Center

Kennedy Space Center launch pads A (foreground) and B (background). The Atlantic Ocean is to the right. (Public domain image by NASA.)

A NASA historical report has this to say about the choice of a launch site for Saturn series rockets that would later take humans to the moon[1]:

The short-lived plan to transport the Saturn by air was prompted by ABMA’s interest in launching a rocket into equatorial orbit from a site near the Equator; Christmas Island in the Central Pacific was a likely choice. Equatorial launch sites offered certain advantages over facilities within the continental United States. A launching due east from a site on the Equator could take advantage of the earth’s maximum rotational velocity (460 meters per second) to achieve orbital speed. The more frequent overhead passage of the orbiting vehicle above an equatorial base would facilitate tracking and communications. Most important, an equatorial launch site would avoid the costly dogleg technique, a prerequisite for placing rockets into equatorial orbit from sites such as Cape Canaveral, Florida (28 degrees north latitude). The necessary correction in the space vehicle’s trajectory could be very expensive – engineers estimated that doglegging a Saturn vehicle into a low-altitude equatorial orbit from Cape Canaveral used enough extra propellant to reduce the payload by as much as 80%. In higher orbits, the penalty was less severe but still involved at least a 20% loss of payload. There were also significant disadvantages to an equatorial launch base: higher construction costs (about 100% greater), logistics problems, and the hazards of setting up an American base on foreign soil.

Russia’s main launch facility, Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (former USSR territory), launches east over the largely uninhabited Betpak-Dala desert region. China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre launches east over the uninhabited Altyn-Tagh mountains. The Guiana Space Centre, the major launch facility of the European Space Agency, is located on the coast of French Guiana, an overseas department of France on the north-east coast of South America, where it launches east over the Atlantic Ocean.

Guiana Space Centre

Guiana Space Centre, French Guiana. The Atlantic Ocean is in the background. (Photo: ESA-Stephane Corvaja, released under ESA Standard Licence.)

Another consideration when choosing your rocket launching site is that the initial momentum boost provided by the Earth’s rotation is greatest at the equator, where the rotational speed of the Earth’s surface is greatest. At the equator, the surface is moving 40,000 km (the circumference of the Earth) per day, or 1670 km/h. Compare this to latitude 41° (roughly New York City, or Madrid), where the speed is 1260 km/h, and you see that our rockets get a free 400 km/h boost by being launched from the equator compared to these locations. So you want to place your launch facility as close to the equator as is practical, given the other considerations.

Rotation of Earth

Because the Earth is a rotating globe, the equatorial regions are moving faster than anywhere else, and provide more of a boost to rocket launch velocities.

The European Space Agency, in particular, has problems with launching rockets from Europe, because of its dense population, unavailability of an eastern coastline, and distance from the equator. This makes French Guiana much more attractive, even though it’s so far away. The USA has placed its major launch facility in just about the best location possible in the continental US. Anywhere closer to the equator on the east coast is taken up by Miami’s urban sprawl. The former USSR went for southern Kazakhstan as a compromise between getting as far south as possible, and being close enough to Moscow. China’s more southern and coastal regions are much more heavily populated, so they went with a remote inland area (possibly also to help keep it hidden for military reasons).

All of these facilities so far are in the northern hemisphere. There are no major rocket launch facilities in the southern hemisphere, and in fact only two sites from where orbital flight has been achieved: Australia’s Woomera Range Complex, which is a remote air force base chosen historically for military logistical reasons (including nuclear weapons testing as well as rocketry in the wake of World War II), and New Zealand’s Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1, a new private facility for launching small satellites, whose location was governed by the ability to privately acquire and develop land.

But if you were to build a major launch facility in the southern hemisphere, where would you put it?

A major space facility was first proposed for Australia in 1986, with plans for it to be the world’s first commercial spaceport. The proposed site? Near Weipa, on the Cape York Peninsula, essentially as close to the equator as it’s possible to get in Australia.

Site of Weipa in Australia

Site of Weipa in Australia. Apart from Darwin which is at almost exactly the same latitude, there is no larger town further north in Australia. (Adapted from a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International image by John Tann, from Wikimedia Commons.)

The proposal eventually floundered due to lack of money and protests from indigenous land owners, but there is now a current State Government inquiry into constructing a satellite launching facility in Queensland, again in the far north. As a news story points out, “From a very simple perspective, we’ve got potential launch capacity, being closer to the equator in a place like Queensland,” and “the best place to launch satellites from Australia is the coast of Queensland. The closer you are to the equator, the more kick you get from the Earth’s spin.”[2]

So rocket engineers in the southern hemisphere definitely want to build their launch facilities as close to the equator as practically possible too. Repeating what I said earlier, you’d be crazy not to. And this is a consequence of the fact that the Earth is a rotating globe.

On the other hand, if the Earth were flat and non-rotating (as is the case in the most popular flat Earth models), there would be no such incentive to build your launch facility anywhere compared to anywhere else, and equatorial locations would not be so coveted. And if the Earth were flat and rotating around the north pole, then you’d get your best bang for buck not near the equator, but near the rim of the rotating disc, where the linear speed of rotation is highest. If that were the case, then everyone would be clamouring to build their launch sites as close to Antarctica as possible, which is clearly not the case in the real (globular) world.

[1] Benson, C. D., Faherty, W. B. Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations. Chapter 1.2, NASA Special Publication-4204 in the NASA History Series, 1978. https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4204/contents.html (accessed 2019-07-15).

[2] “Rocket launches touted for Queensland as State Government launches space industry inquiry”. ABC News, 6 September 2018. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-06/queensland-shoots-for-the-stars-to-become-space-hub/10205686 (accessed 2019-07-15).

16. Lunar eclipses

Lunar eclipses occur when the Earth is positioned between the sun and the moon, so that the Earth blocks some or all of the sunlight from directly reaching the moon. Because of the relative sizes of the sun, Earth, and moon, and their distances from one another, the Earth’s shadow is large enough to completely cover the moon.

To talk about eclipses, we need to define some terms. The sun is a large, extended source of light, not a point source, so the shadows that objects cast in sunlight have two components: the umbra, where light from the sun is totally blocked, and the penumbra, where light from the sun is partially blocked.

Umbra and penumbra

Diagram showing the umbra and penumbra cast by the Earth. Not to scale. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

When the moon passes entirely inside the Earth’s umbra, that is a total lunar eclipse. Although no sunlight reaches the moon directly, the moon is not completely dark, because some sunlight refracts (bends) through the Earth’s atmosphere and reaches the moon. This light is red for the same reason that sunsets on Earth tend to be red: the atmosphere scatters blue light more easily than red, so red light penetrates large distances of air more easily. This is why during a total lunar eclipse the moon is a reddish colour. Although a totally eclipsed moon looks bright enough to our eyes, it’s actually very dark compared to a normal full moon. Our eyes are very good at compensating for the different light levels without us being aware of it.

Total lunar eclipse

Total lunar eclipse of 28 August 2007 (photographed by me). 1 second exposure at ISO 800 and aperture f/2.8.

The amount of refracted light reaching the moon depends on the cleanliness of the Earth’s atmosphere. If there have been recent major volcanic eruptions, then significantly less light passes through to reach the moon. The brightness of the moon during a total lunar eclipse can be measured using the Danjon scale, ranging from 0 for very dark eclipses, to 4 for the brightest ones. After the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, the next few lunar eclipses were extremely dark, with the eclipse of December 1992 rating a 0 on the Danjon scale.

When the moon is only partly inside the Earth’s umbra, that is a partial lunar eclipse. A partial phase occurs on either side of a total lunar eclipse, as the moon passes through the Earth’s shadow, and it can also occur as the maximal phase of an eclipse if the moon’s orbit isn’t aligned to carry it fully within the umbra. During a partial eclipse phase, you can see the edge of the Earth’s umbral shadow on the moon.

Partial lunar eclipse phase

Partial phase of the same lunar eclipse of 28 August 2007. 1/60 second exposure at ISO 100 and f/8, which is 1/3840 the exposure of the totality photo above. If this photo was 3840 times as bright, the dark part at the bottom would look as bright as the totality photo (and the bright part would be completely washed out).

Lunar eclipses can only occur at the full moon – those times when the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the Earth. The moon orbits the Earth roughly once every 29.5 days and so full moons occur every 29.5 days. However, lunar eclipses occur only two to five times per year, because the moon’s orbit is tilted by 5.1° relative to the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. This means that sometimes when the moon is full it is above or below the Earth’s shadow, rather than inside it.

Okay, so what can lunar eclipses tell us about the shape of the Earth? A lunar eclipse is a unique opportunity to see the shape of the Earth via its shadow. A shadow is the same shape as a cross-section of the object casting the shadow. Let’s have another look at the shape of Earth’s shadow on the moon, in a series of photos taken during a lunar eclipse:

Lunar eclipse montage

Montage of photos taken over 83 minutes during the lunar eclipse of 28 August 2007. Again, the bottom row of photos have 3840 times the exposure of the top row, so the eclipsed moon is nearly 4000 times dimmer than the full moon.

As you can see, the edge of the Earth’s shadow is curved. The fact that the moon’s surface is curved doesn’t affect this, because we are looking from the same direction as the Earth, so we see the same cross-section of the moon. (Your own shadow looks the shape of a person to you, even if it falls on an irregular surface where it looks distorted to someone else.) So from this observation we can conclude that the edge of the Earth is rounded.

Many shapes can cause a rounded shadow. However, if you observe multiple lunar eclipses, you will see that the Earth’s shadow is always round, and what’s more, it always has the same radius of curvature. And different lunar eclipses occur at any given location on Earth with the moon at different points in the sky, including sometimes when the moon is not in the sky (because the location is facing away from the moon). This means that different lunar eclipses occur when different parts of the Earth are facing the moon, which means that different parts of the Earth’s edge are casting the shadow edge on the moon. So from these observation, we can see that the shape of the shadow does not depend on the orientation of the Earth to the moon.

There is only one solid shape for which the shape of its shadow doesn’t depend on the object’s orientation. A sphere. So observations of lunar eclipses show that the Earth is a globe.

Addendum: A common rebuttal by Flat Earthers is that lunar eclipses are not caused by the Earth’s shadow, but by some other mechanism entirely – usually another celestial object getting between the sun and moon and blocking the light. But any such object is apparently the same colour as the sky, making it mysteriously otherwise completely undetectable, and does not have the simple elegance of explanation (and the supporting evidence from numerous other observations) of the moon moving around the Earth and entering its shadow.

3. Meteor arrival rates

[audio version of this article]

Meteors are small interplanetary objects that cause visible streaks of light in the sky when they collide with the Earth’s atmosphere. Before this visible collision, the object in space is called a meteoroid, and if any pieces of the object survive to land on the surface of Earth they are called meteorites. Meteoroids are considered to range from roughly the size of a peppercorn up to about a metre across. Larger objects are generally called asteroids, while smaller ones are micrometeoroids or space dust.

Most meteoroids are made of various types of rock, but a small percentage are mostly iron or iron-nickel alloy, and a few are icy. There are vast numbers of these objects in orbit around the sun, and many million enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day, although only a small fraction of those are large enough to produce a meteor trail visible to the human eye. Meteoroids originate from the asteroid belt, or as broken off parts of comets. These small objects are very easily perturbed by the gravity of large objects in the solar system, which effectively randomises their orbits. So in any region of the solar system, the positions and velocities of meteoroids is more or less random.

Henbury Meteorite

One of the Henbury Meteorites, cut to show iron composition.

From an observation point on Earth, we can watch for meteors. Better than counting by eye, we have built specialised radar systems that can detect meteors with greater sensitivity, including during daylight hours, and we can set them up counting meteors all day, every day. Every time the radar detects a meteor, it can record where in the sky it was, what direction it moved, and what time the event occurred. Thinking about the time in particular, we can count how many meteors arrive during any given hour, and average this over many days to produce an hourly rate of meteor events. Many experiments do just this.

Let’s consider what time of day meteors arrive, and if the hourly rate of meteors is the same at all times, or if it varies with time. If the Earth were flat, how might we expect the hourly rate of meteors to behave? Is there any reason to think that the hourly rate of meteors might be different at, say, 8pm, compared to 4am? Or midnight? If the Earth is flat, then… meteors should probably arrive at the same rate all the time. There’s no obvious reason to think it might vary at all.

What happens in reality?

There are several published studies showing measurements of the hourly arrival rate of meteors versus the time of day. Here are some graphs from one such paper (reference [1]):

Hourly meteor rate graph 1

Hourly meteor arrival rate at Esrange Space Centre, Sweden. Figure reproduced from [1].

These graphs show the average number of meteors observed arriving during each hour of the day as observed by a meteor-detecting radar station at the Esrange Space Centre near Kiruna in Sweden. The numbers on the vertical axis are normalised so that the 24 hourly bins add up to 1. As shown earlier in the paper, the total number of meteors observed per day is roughly 2000 to 5000, for an overall average of approximately 150 per hour. The times on the horizontal axis are in Universal Time, but Sweden’s time zone is UTC+1, so local midnight occurs at 23 on the graph. Notice that the number of meteors observed per hour is not constant throughout the day, but varies in a systematic pattern. Hmmm.

Here’s another set of data (reference [2]):

Hourly meteor rate graph 2

Hourly meteor arrival rate at stations in southern USA. Figure reproduced from [2].

This shows the hourly arrival rate of meteors for a single day as recorded by the American Meteor Society Radiometer Project stations in the southern USA. Again, the times shown are UTC, but the time zone is UTC-6, so local midnight occurs at 6 on the graph.

For good measure, here’s one more (reference [3]):

Hourly meteor rate graph 3

Hourly meteor arrival rate at three SKiYMET stations. Figures reproduced from [3].

These plots show the hourly arrival rate of meteors at three separate SKiYMET meteor observation sites, at latitudes 69°N, 22°S, and 35°S respectively. The times shown on the horizontal axis here are all local times.

Now, notice how in all of these graphs that the hourly arrival rate of meteors varies by time of day. In particular, in every case there is a maximum in the arrival rate at around 6am local time (to within 2 or 3 hours), and a minimum at around 6pm local time. This pattern, once you notice it, is striking. What could be the cause?

The Earth is moving in its orbit about the sun. In other words, it is sweeping through space, in an almost circular path around the sun. Now, remember that the distribution of meteoroid locations and velocities in space is essentially random. If the Earth is moving through this random scattering of meteoroids, it should sweep up more meteors on the side of the planet that is moving forwards, and fewer on the side that is trailing. And the Earth is also rotating about its axis, this rotation being what causes the daily variation of night and day – in other words the times of the day.

Earth orbit diagram

Diagram showing movement of Earth in its orbit and rotation. Earth image is public domain from NASA.

The side of the Earth that is moving forwards is the side where the rotation of the Earth is bringing the dark part of the Earth into the light of the sun, at the dawn of a new day. We call this the dawn terminator. In terms of the clock and time zones, this part of the Earth has a time around 6am. The trailing side of the Earth is the sunset terminator, with a time around 6pm. There will be some variation, up to a couple of hours or so at moderate latitudes, caused by the seasons (the effect of the tilt in the Earth’s rotation axis relative to its orbit).

In other words, if the Earth is a rotating sphere in space, orbiting around the sun, we should expect that the dawn part of the Earth, where the local time is around 6am, should sweep up more meteors than the sunset part of the Earth, where the local time is around 6pm. And if the Earth is a sphere, this variation should be sinusoidal – the distinctive smooth shape of a wave as traced out by points rotating around a circle.

And this is exactly what we see. The variation in the hourly arrival rate of meteors, as observed all across the Earth, matches the prediction you would make if the Earth was a globe. One consequence of the Earth being a globe is that if you want to see meteors – other than during one of the regular annual meteor showers – it’s much better to get up before dawn than to stay up late.

References:

[1] Younger, P. T.; Astin, I.; Sandford, D. J.; and Mitchell, N. J. “The sporadic radiant and distribution of meteors in the atmosphere as observed by VHF radar at Arctic, Antarctic and equatorial latitudes”, Annales Geophysicae, 27, p. 2831-2841, 2009. https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-27-2831-2009
[2] Meisel, D. D.; Richardson, J. E. “Statistical properties of meteors from a simple, passive forward scatter system”. Planetary and Space Science, 47, p. 107-124, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0032-0633(98)00096-8
[3] Singer, W; von Zahn, U; Batista, Paulo; Fuller, Brian; and Latteck, Ralph. “Diurnal and annual variations of meteor rates at latitudes between 69°N and 35°S”. In The 17th ESA Symposium on European Rocket and Balloon Programmes and Related Research, Sandefjord, Norway, 2005, ISBN 92-9092-901-4, p. 151-156. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252769360_Diurnal_and_annual_variations_of_meteor_rates_at_latitudes_between_69N_and_35S