Death of a Comet: What We Learned from the Passing of ISON
FYI - 600 meters in diameter would be 0.3728 miles. Initial estimates had it at 2-3 km and 3 km is 1.864 miles not 3 miles. The diameter of the nucleus of Encke's Comet on the other hand is 4.8 km/2.983 miles.
Re: the STEREO-A image you posted:
What we're looking at here is a cropped section of a 20-degree field of view, taken from a spacecraft that is far from Earth. We can see not only comet ISON entering the field of view but also Comet 2P/Encke, Mercury and that little place we like to call home! The dark "clouds" of stuff you see coming from the right are density enhancements in the solar wind, and these are what are causing all the ripples you see in comet Encke's tail. I can pretty much promise you that we're going to see ISON's tail doing that in a couple of day's time, but on a much larger scale! (ISON is closer to STEREO-A than Encke is -- this has little to do with relative sizes of the comets). Indeed, these kinds of solar wind interactions are exactly what I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and they give us valuable information about solar wind conditions near the Sun. And this leads me very nicely to the last -- and, to me, most exciting -- thing I'll say for now (brevity, remember...). Notice the motion of the two comets. Notice the direction Encke is moving in, and then the direction ISON is coming in at. Then note that ISON is moving quite a bit quicker than Encke (both true in reality and because ISON is closer to the camera). See where I'm going? Or where the comets are going?? No they're not going to hit each other -- in reality they are millions of miles apart -- but as seen from the STEREO-A spacecraft, they are going to get very close! How close, I don't know. Tomorrow I hope to give you that answer but it involves math and software, and it has been a long day. But regardless, we are probably a couple of days away from seeing two comets almost side-by-side in that camera, with long tails flowing behind them in the solar wind. To say that such an image will be unprecedented is rather an understatement.
ISON, Encke, Mercury, and Home
You might also find this interesting (or not)
Measuring the Size of ISON's Nucleus: Point Spread Function
As far as meteor showers, most of what you see as shooting stars are very tiny. Meteor showers are debris left from comet tails or disintegrated asteroids.
“Most meteors are smaller than a grain of sand, so almost all of them disintegrate and never hit the Earth’s surface”.
http://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/
“These particles comprise the meteor stream. Most are no larger than a grain of sand, while some may be the size of a fingernail, and a few might be the size of your closed fist.” http://www.theskyscrapers.org/meteor-showers/
“"Shooting stars", falling stars" or meteors, call them what you like. These pinpoints of light that streak across the night sky are tiny bits of rock from space. They enter our atmosphere at speeds up to 71 km/s (~158,000 miles mph). They glow because friction with air molecules heats them to incandescence. Most are smaller than a grain of rice. They burn up in a second or two at altitudes of around 80 km, high in the ionosphere. An especially bright meteor is called a fireball or bolide.”
And
“There are two kinds of meteors – sporadic meteors and shower meteors. Sporadics originate from random bits of solar system dust that orbit the Sun. Their chance encounters with Earth are unpredictable. While they do slightly cluster in various parts of the sky, their occurrence is sporadic – hence the name. Sporadics are the ones most people see while gazing into the night sky. Naked-eye rates for sporadic meteors seldom exceed five per hour. As far as we know, all meteors that reach the ground - meteorites - come from sporadics."
And
“Only rarely is a meteor large enough to survive its fiery passage through the atmosphere and reach the ground. These are called meteorites. No shower meteor is known to have ever reached the ground, which means that comet dust is in the form of very small particles.”
http://geology.com/articles/meteor-shower.shtml
And the spectacular fireball meteor seen over Arizona was a sporadic meteor and not related to the annual Geminid meteor shower.
“The meteor was small and quick. With a width of about half a meter, its size pales in comparison to the 20-meter meteor that landed in Russia earlier this year. But meteorite hunters are still scrambling to southern Arizona, trying to find surviving pieces of Tuesday’s fireball.”
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/12/13/meteoroid-explodes-over-arizona-more-to-come-this-weekend/
Did Comet Cause Solar Explosion? Hardly, Experts Say
“On a final note, I want to tie all this in to Comet ISON, which is why we have the website in the first place. We know that ISON is not a massive comet; we think it's in the range of ~0.5km - 2km. It's also certainly not on a sun-striking orbit, though will fly through the outer solar atmosphere. But keep the following in mind: coronal mass ejections (which are different to flares, btw!) happen a few times per day, every day during periods of high solar activity. The chances are thus pretty high that we'll see at least one CME in the hours surrounding ISON's perihelion passage in November of this year. This does not mean that it will have caused a CME! I'm sure I will need to quote this come November, so remember that you read it here first!” Sun-grazers, Sun-strikers and CMEs
In other words, just about everything you post here and from your pal at BPEarthwatch are false and laughable. If as you say are interested in learning about comets and astronomy, lay off the amateur crank YouTube videos and educate yourself. And stop trying to make conservatives look stupid, uneducated or even possibly mentally ill by posting this crap here – Thanks!