About 20 million people, mostly based in North America and Europe, regularly post short public messages about their daily life on Twitter. When these people witness or hear about a spectacular event, some of them will post a message about it. By monitoring the number of messages that contain a meteor-related word, we can measure the public interest in meteors and be alerted when it is unusually high. This may indicate a fireball, a meteor outburst or just a normal meteor shower.
The graph below shows the hourly number of Twitter messages containing the English terms meteor(s), meteorite(s), fireball(s), the Spanish terms meteoro(s), meteorito(s) or the hashtag #meteorwatch. It is updated every hour. Retweeted messages are not included. The messages are archived to allow the origin of peaks to be analyzed.
Let me know what you think about this graph; is it silly or useful?
Geert Barentsen (Armagh Observatory)
E-mail: gba -at- arm.ac.uk