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Chasing

Title text: Certain hybrid events can only happen in certain locations where all the conditions are present; chasers flock to the area in and around Kansas known as tumbleweed-colliding-with-possum alley.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by an exciting BOT on the run - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.

This comic is a scatter plot comparing how exciting it is to see various things with how possible it is to chase those things using a convoy of coordinated vehicles.

The least chasable are stationary places like the Grand Canyon or International Date Line. It makes no sense to chase them because they don't move around, you just go to their known locations. At the other end of he chasability spectrum are animals that move around rapidly, and fleeting astronomical and atmospherical phenomena like clouds, meteors, and aurora. However, some of these are difficult to chase because they're small and hard to detect from a moving vehicle, e.g. gnats.

Entity	Explanation
The Grand Canyon	Stationary place in Arizona. It's the largest canyon in the US (but not the world). It's very beautiful due to its depth and the color changes from different geological strata. So it's exciting to see and one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country.
Niagara Falls	Stationary place on the border of US and Canada, between the state of New York and the province of Ontario. The waterfall is the largest in North America by width and water volume, making it very beautiful to watch.
Tourist attractions	Other stationary places that attract many tourists (e.g. national parks, monuments, and historic places)
Tourist traps	Stationary places that market themselves as tourist attractions, but don't really have much to offer and exist mainly to sell food and souvenirs.
Sand traps	Pits of sand in golf courses. If your golf ball lands in one, it's more difficult to hit it out to the grassy portions (fairways or greens), which is why it's a "trap".
The International Date Line	Jagged line running from the North to South poles around 180 degrees of longitude, used to separate the time zones that start and end each day. There's nothing to actually see at these locations, and it's mostly in oceans.
Meteors	Also called "shooting stars". These are fleeting streaks of light that are visible when bits of rock or dust enter the atmosphere and burn up. These are generally rare, making them exciting to see, but there are meteor showers when many are visible due to the Earth passing through a large cloud of dust (usually the remnants of a comet). To astronomy buffs, these can be like natural fireworks shows. Because each meteor streak lasts for a fraction of a second, it's not generally possible to chase them, although if the rock is large enough it may survive to the ground and become a meteorite, which chasers may be able to find by tracking its path through the sky.
Rainbows	A visual effect that occurs when sunlight is refracted by water droplets in the air, spreading the light into a spectrum of different colors.
Comets	Comets are chunks of rock and ice that orbit the sun, usually in highly eccentric orbits that take them from the inner Solar System to the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud at the extreme outskirts of the Solar System. Few of them are visible to the naked eye. They're exciting to see because they're rare, and one of the few astronomical objects that looks like more than just a tiny dot because there's a glowing "tail". While they're moving very rapidly through the Solar System, from the Earth they don't appear to move much faster than planets. So there's no need to chase them; when near the Earth, it will be visible from much of the planet for days or weeks.
Sunsets	Disappearance of the Sun below the horizon, should happen usually once every 24 hours (except close to the poles). Depending on weather conditions, they can sometimes be very pretty.
The Moon	Earth's only natural satellite with a predictable orbit
Unusual clouds
Regular clouds
Fog	Atmospheric condition where water droplets are very dense near the Earth's surface, resulting in a visible haze. Very few people will chase fog.[citation needed]
Rain	Water droplets falling from clouds. In most of the world, this is a pretty common occurrence. Unless the volume is extremely high, there's rarely much excitement due to them, but extreme cases may cause flooding that can be dangerous. The only people who typically chase them are weather reporters.
Aurora	Impressive light displays that result from excitement of the Earth's magnetosphere by charged particles in the solar wind. These are generally only visible in high latitudes, so most people do not live where they're visible. Their visibility can be tracked and forecasted via monitoring of solar wind output from the sun, and particularly intense episodes can be predicted (as well as locations for viewing) on the basis of the solar cycle and solar flare activity. The release of this comic happens to coincide with the first severe geomagnetic storm warning (G4) issued by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 20 years [1].
Your favorite band's shows	Musical acts often plan "tours", where they go around the country (or world) putting on shows every few days. Extreme fans with time on their hands may "chase" them by going to a series of their shows. Since the tour dates are planned and publicized well in advance, this is relatively easy.
Rare birds	Many birders will "twitch" to see rare birds, and this requires a fair amount of checking location, behavior, etc. Also, rare birds tend to be exciting to see.
Regular birds	These are easier to see than rare birds.[citation needed]
Hot air balloons
Radiosondes	Small instruments carried in weather balloons to gather and transmit atmospheric parameters. There's not much to see in them, but they're easy to track with a proper receiver.
Neighborhood possums
Regular balloons	Both children and adults accidentally let go of balloons, and will attempt to chase after it to retrieve it.
Ice cream trucks
Gnats	Nobody wants to track down gnats, but people could theoretically use advanced instruments to do so.
Tumbleweeds
Speed traps
Other chasers

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[An X Y axis graph]

[Y axis label:]

Exciting to see in person

[X axis label:]

Possible to chase in a convoy of vehicles coordinating over radio and using instruments and data to find optimal viewing locations?

[X and Y axis values (from bottom left):]

No

Yes

[Top left quarter:]

The Grand Canyon

Meteors

Rainbow

Comets

Niagara Falls

Sunsets

The Moon

Tourist attractions

Unusual clouds

[Top right quarter:]

Aurora

Tornadoes

Whales

Your favorite band's shows

Icebergs

Rare birds

Hot air balloons

[Bottom left quarter:]

Tourist traps

Regular clouds

Sand traps

Fog

Rain

The International Date Line

Gnats

[Bottom right quarter:]

Regular birds

Radiosondes

Neighborhood possums

Regular balloons

Ice cream trucks

Tumbleweeds

Speed traps

Other chasers

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