juliensimon/iau-meteor-showers
IAU Meteor Shower Database Credit: NASA/ESA Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face. Dataset description The complete IAU Meteor Data Center shower catalogue with radiant coordinates, geocentric velocities, orbital elements, and parent body identifications. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) Meteor Data Center maintains the authoritative list of meteor showers. This dataset includes every entry from the MDC shower database: established… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/iau-meteor-showers.
IAU Meteor Shower Database
<div align="center"> <img src="banner.jpg" alt="Rosetta spacecraft approaching Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko" width="400"> <p><em>Credit: NASA/ESA</em></p> </div>
Part of a [dataset collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/juliensimon/orbital-mechanics-datasets-69c24caca4ab3934c9856994) on Hugging Face.
Dataset description
The complete IAU Meteor Data Center shower catalogue with radiant coordinates, geocentric velocities, orbital elements, and parent body identifications.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) Meteor Data Center maintains the authoritative list of meteor showers. This dataset includes every entry from the MDC shower database: established showers, working-list candidates, and records flagged for various issues (insufficient data, duplicates, misclassifications). Multiple records per shower reflect independent analyses by different research groups.
Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through a stream of debris shed by a comet or, less commonly, an asteroid along its orbit. The radiant -- the apparent point on the sky from which shower meteors diverge -- is determined by the intersection geometry of Earth's orbit with the meteoroid stream. The geocentric velocity depends on the encounter geometry and the stream's own orbital velocity: head-on encounters with retrograde streams (like the Perseids, from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle) produce fast meteors at 59 km/s, while overtaking encounters with prograde streams (like the Taurids) yield slower meteors near 27 km/s. The radiant position drifts daily as Earth's motion changes the apparent approach direction, captured by the radailymotion and decdailymotion columns.
The orbital elements of each shower constrain the identity of its parent body. Established parent-shower associations are well-determined for major showers (e.g., 1P/Halley for the Eta Aquariids and Orionids, 21P/Giacobini-Zinner for the Draconids), but many working-list showers lack confirmed parents. The solar longitude at peak activity provides a more precise timing reference than calendar date, as it accounts for the irregularities of Earth's elliptical orbit. Multiple records per IAU shower number reflect independent analyses using different observational techniques (visual, video, radar), each contributing orbital element solutions with varying precision and sample sizes recorded in the n_meteors column.
Schema
Quick stats
- 2,165 records across 1,031 unique showers
- 108 IAU-established showers
- 372 records with identified parent body
Usage
from datasets import load_dataset
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/iau-meteor-showers", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()
# All established showers (primary record only)
established = df[(df["is_established"] == True) & (df["ad_no"] == 0)]
# Major annual showers sorted by geocentric velocity
majors = established[established["activity_type"] == "annual"].sort_values(
"geocentric_velocity_kms", ascending=False
)
# Plot geocentric velocity distribution of established showers
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 5))
plt.hist(established["geocentric_velocity_kms"].dropna(), bins=30, edgecolor="black")
plt.xlabel("Geocentric Velocity (km/s)")
plt.ylabel("Number of Showers")
plt.title("Geocentric Velocity Distribution of IAU Established Meteor Showers")
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()
# Showers with known parent bodies
with_parent = df[df["parent_body"].notna()][
["shower_name", "parent_body", "iau_no"]
].drop_duplicates("iau_no")
print(with_parent.head(20))Data source
https://www.ta3.sk/IAUC22DB/MDC2022/
Related datasets
Citation
@dataset{iau_meteor_showers,
title = {IAU Meteor Shower Database},
author = {Simon, Julien},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/iau-meteor-showers},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
note = {Derived from Astronomical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, https://www.ta3.sk/IAUC22DB/MDC2022/}
}