This is a good example of exactly what I was talking about chessplayer – not so much the article which isn’t all that too bad, but the “news” video. Now and probably for many months to come, every time someone sees a shooting star or a meteor streak across the sky, rather common events BTW, it will get all sorts media coverage and comparisons will be made to the Russian meteor and to such and extent that breathless news readers will infer and low information type folks will believe that all of a sudden there are just so many of them, more now than ever before it would seem and ask “why is this happening all of a sudden?” when just like the “Summer of the Shark” in truth, they happen all the time with no more or less frequency than before.
I predict that 2013 will be the "Spring of the Meteors" (although "Cruise Ship Sewage Disaster Worse Than the Titanic" might be in the running as well) just as 2001 was the Summer of the Sharks, and some year, I don’t remember which it was, was the “Poison Apple Year” thanks in part to Meryl Streep, and some other year was the “Dead Fish Washing Up On The Shore Year”, and some other was the “Run Away Car Accelerators Year”….etc. and on and on, that is of course until some other sensational and overwrought story takes over.
Well, get used to it because 2013 actually *is* going to be unusually active from an astronomical perspective, enough so that I got my niece a decent lower end telescope for Christmas.
There’s one more known near-Earth asteroid, then comet PANSTARRS in March, followed by the green comet Lemmon already visible in the southern hemisphere that will be visible to us in April, and then there’s the big one, comet ISON, that appears poised to be the second brightest object in the sky for a month or so, behind only to the sun, visible in broad daylight.
It will be at it’s brightest after it passes perihelion in late November, assuming it doesn’t break up from passing fairly close to the sun as comets go.