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About 10 pm, WNW in the sky from central Jersey, moving right to left, split trail, dimming and brightening, biggest one I've ever seen. Probably visible in Eastern PA also.

Cape Town: Astronomers and amateur sky watchers across North America went to bed early Saturday disappointed by a meteor shower hyped as "potentially spectacular" that, in the end, was a dud. The US Naval Observatory described the Camelopardalids meteor shower on Friday as a "potentially spectacular show," but that potential was never fulfilled. The meteor shower could be seen by people in the United States, Canada and Mexico starting around 0230 GMT Saturday, according to NASA. A weak showing, combined with passing clouds and light pollution from towns and cities, conspired to turn what many hoped would be a light...

Astronomers are predicting the astronomical event of a lifetime next week. On 24 May 2014, Earth will pass through the debris tail of Comet 209P/LINEAR, which will unleash a myriad of cosmic explosions lighting up the night sky. This will be the first time Earth has ever experienced this particular meteor shower. A meteor shower happens when the Earth passes through debris left in space by a comet; the chunks of rock, ice and other materials, burn up in the atmosphere to form ‘shooting’ or ‘falling stars’.

It sounds like a remarkable story, almost unbelievable: Anders Helstrup went skydiving nearly two years ago near Hedmark, Norway and while he didn’t realize it at the time, when he reviewed the footage taken by two cameras fixed to his helmet during the dive, he saw a rock plummet past him. He took it to experts and they realized he had captured a meteorite falling during its “dark flight” — when it has been slowed by atmospheric braking, and has cooled and is no longer luminous. Norwegian astrophysicist Pål Brekke confirmed to Universe Today that the story is true. “I...

For the first time ever, a meteor has been captured on camera falling through the sky after it has finished burning. And that’s not all: the baseball-sized space rock nearly slammed into the man behind the camera.

Can you imagine the devastation that would be caused if a massive wall of water several hundred feet high slammed into Florida at more than 100 miles an hour? To many people such a scenario is impossible, but that is what people living along the Indian Ocean thought before the 2004 tsunami and that is what people living in Japan thought before the 2011 tsunami. Throughout history, giant tsunamis have been relatively rare events, but they do happen. Scientists tell us that a mega-tsunami can race across the open ocean at up to 500 miles an hour, and when they...

Oswego, NY -- Upstate New Yorkers who heard a loud boom or saw a streak of light across the sky Sunday more than likely witnessed a meteor, according to an astronomy expert. View full size Did a piece of Comet ISON reach Upstate New York? In this photo provided by NASA, a contrast-enhanced image produced from the Hubble images of comet ISON taken April 23, 2013 reveals the subtle structure in the inner coma of the comet. In this computer-processed view, the Hubble image has been divided by a computer model coma that decreases in brightness proportionally to the distance...

BRAINERD, Minn. — Residents in the Brainerd lakes area reported seeing flashes of light streaking across the sky and hearing a boom that rattled homes and buildings, and meteorologists say the reports are consistent with a meteor event. The reports started flowing in to authorities on Friday between 9:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., the Brainerd Dispatch reported (http://bit.ly/1cPPrbq ). Some residents said they saw a turquoise streak light up the sky, and others say a bright light illuminated their homes, even darkened rooms where the drapes were closed.

....The Geminids come from a small asteroid named 3200 Phaethon, which passes quite close to the sun. Its trail of dust and debris is what makes up the Geminids. Earth passes through this stream of debris every December. “Most meteor showers come from comets, which spew ample meteoroids for a night of ‘shooting stars.’ The Geminid meteor shower is different,” NASA writes in their Geminids site. “The parent is not a comet, but a weird rocky object named 3200 Phaethon that sheds very little dusty debris — not nearly enough to explain the Geminids.”.... “The Geminids are my favourite because...

LOXAHATCHEE, Fla. - The family of a 7-year-old boy says their son was hurt after small meteorites fell from the sky while he was playing outside. Steven Lippard was in his driveway Saturday in Palm Beach County when he began bleeding. The family initially thought he may have been hit by a golf ball or a bird, but then found several small rocks nearby. The rocks were taken to Florida Atlantic University. Initial tests showed the rocks were metallic and could have come from space. Experts are now doing more tests to confirm the possibility. Meteorite strikes around the world...

Strange Space Object Stumps Astronomers; Appears to be Asteroid but Has Six Comet-Like Tails Posted by Russell Westerholm Astronomers have spotted a curious comet-like spatial object with the Hubble Telescope that has six trails, causing it to look like a badminton shuttlecock, BBC News reported. The observers were lead to believe the object is an asteroid because it was spotted in an asteroid belt, but its tails are more characteristic of a comet. Asteroids also typically only appear as tiny dots of light. "We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," Dave Jewitt, a professor from the University of California...

The fragment is so large that divers have been unable to lift it. Instead, it's been dragged along the bottom of the lake on a metal sheet. At 1,257 pounds--that's 570 kilos--It will be almost as big as the Holsinger meteorite, which landed in Arizona 50,000 years ago, and broke the scales when it was weighed earlier today. The rock will be tested to verify that it is from space and not from somewhere more mundane.

The brilliant streak seen on Friday night in the skies over central Ohio was a piece of an asteroid or comet that was 2 to 3 feet across and hit the atmosphere at 113,000 mph, a NASA official said yesterday. The bright flash of light at 11:33 p.m. prompted some people to call Columbus police to ask what it was while officers chatted about the event over their radios. “The initial trajectory suggests it passed over Columbus, Ohio, moving slightly north of west,” Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office told The Dispatch in an email. Cooke said there were...

Look for the 2013 Perseid meteor shower to be at its prolific best from late late August 11 until dawn August 12! Great times to watch: after midnight and before dawn on August 11, 12 or 13. We give the nod to Monday, August 12 – in the hours between midnight and dawn. But any of these mornings should be fine for watching this year’s Perseid shower. At dusk and early evening on August 11, the waxing crescent moon shines between the planet Venus and the star Spica. The planet Saturn is found above Spica. The Perseids are a summertime...

August 5, 2013 – SIBERIA - Having an official task to draw up a geological map of the region, a young geologist ended up running into something so unique, outstanding and mysterious that it would still puzzle scientists more than six decades later – the Patomskiy Crater. A host of theories have been put forward in the intervening years: that the crater was created by an ancient civilization, or by prisoners at a top secret Stalin labor camp, or by volcanic activity, or by a meteorite, or by an underground hydrogen explosion, or by a UFO. And even more...

It's well known that the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago when a meteor hit what is now southern Mexico but evidence is accumulating that the biggest extinction of all, 252.3m years ago, at the end of the Permian period, was also triggered by an impact that changed the climate. While the idea that an impact caused the Permian extinction has been around for a while, what's been missing is a suitable crater to confirm it. Associate Professor Eric Tohver of the University of Western Australia's School of Earth and Environment believes he has found the impact crater...

May 17, 2013: For the past 8 years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. "Lunar meteor showers" have turned out to be more common than anyone expected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring every year. They've just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the program. "On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've...

A LARGE meteor was spotted in the sky above Cornwall in the early hours of this morning. A giant green meteor was spotted by astronomers in the skies above Cornwall Experts have said the phenomenon was likely to have been debris from Halley's Comet. The large lump of space rock was seen by people across England and Wales and Twitter was abuzz with reports of sightings. A meteor spotter with the handle @VirtualAstronomer, wrote "The meteor fireball was witnessed from Cornwall to the Scottish [sic] borders." A man Tweeting from Nottingham, @TwitFlickR, described it as a "green fireball that lasted...

A bright meteor briefly outshined the lights of New York City Friday evening (March 22), according to reports by witnesses who used Twitter and the Internet to report sightings of the fireball streaking over a broad stretch of the U.S. East Coast. "Strange Friday night … a meteor passed over my house tonight!" wrote one New Yorker writing as Yanksmom19. The first fireball sightings came at about 8 p.m. EDT (0000 March 23 GMT) and sparked more than 500 witness reports to the American Meteor Society. Reports of the meteor flooded Twitter from New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. "The...

Network of stations with seismometers and air pressure sensors detected the blast waves A network of seismographic stations recorded spectacular signals from the blast waves of the meteor that landed near Chelyabinsk, Russia, as the waves crossed the United States. The National Science Foundation- (NSF) supported stations are used to study earthquakes and the Earth's deep interior. While thousands of earthquakes around the globe are recorded by seismometers in these stations--part of the permanent Global Seismographic Network (GSN) and EarthScope's temporary Transportable Array (TA)--signals from large meteor impacts are far less common. The meteor explosion near Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15,...