Radiant (meteor shower) Radiant (meteor shower) The radiant or apparent radiant of a meteor shower is the celestial point in the sky from which (from the point of view of a terrestrial observer) the paths of meteors appear to originate. The Perseids, for example, are meteors which appear to come from a point within the constellation of Perseus. Meteor paths appear at random locations in the sky, but the apparent paths of two or more meteors from the same shower will converge at the radiant. The radiant is the vanishing point of the meteor paths, which are parallel lines in three-dimensional space, as
Clifford parallel Clifford parallel In elliptic geometry, two lines are Clifford parallel or paratactic lines if the perpendicular distance between them is constant from point to point. The concept was first studied by William Kingdon Clifford in elliptic space. Since parallel lines have the property of equidistance, the term "parallel" was appropriated from Euclidean geometry, but in fact the "lines" of elliptic geometry are curves, and they have finite length, unlike the lines of Euclidean geometry. The algebra of quaternions provides a descriptive geometry of elliptic space in which Clifford parallelism is made explicit. The lines on 1 in elliptic space are