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Set your alarm clocks. The Perseid meteor shower, the annual celestial lightshow that Space.com com calls the most widely observed and dependable meteor display of the year, will peak tonight and early tomorrow morning. NASA says this year's show promises to be more spectacular than usual. "If you see one meteor shower this year, make it August's Perseids or December's Geminids," according to the space agency. "The Perseids feature fast and bright meteors that frequently leave trains, and in 2015 there will be no moonlight to upstage the shower." And Jupiter's positioning this year will make for even better viewing,...

Explanation: Leonids Meteor Shower came to an impressive crescendo in 1999. Observers in Europe saw a sharp peak in the number of meteors visible around 0210 UTC during the early morning hours of November 18. Meteor counts then exceeded 1000 per hour - the minimum needed to define a true meteor storm. At other times and from other locations around the world, observers typically reported respectable rates of between 30 and 100 meteors per hour. This photograph is a 20-minute exposure ending just before the main Leonids peak began. Visible are at least five Leonid meteors streaking high above the...

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...

John Bochanski wrote an article tilted The Next New Meteor Shower,Astronomers confirm that debris from Comet 209P/LINEAR should create a sky show on May 24, 2014 on November 12, 2013 that is one of the most detailed I've read so far. Here are some excerpts from it. "Most meteor showers ... occur when Earth plows into the debris trail left behind by a comet. The comet throws this debris off as itÂ’s heated by the Sun, but while all comets heat up as they enter the inner solar system, many do not have orbits that intersect with EarthÂ’s. ......

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)With NASA reporting a “potentially hazardous” asteroid nearly half-a-mile wide possibly heading toward earth, and some upstate New Yorkers claiming they experienced a loud boom and a bright light in the sky last night caused by a meteor, a doctors’ organization is offering some timely advice: Just as when the American populace first prepared for the possibility of a nuclear blast, a person’s best option for surviving a meteor strike is the same “duck and cover” created during the 1940s and ’50s when nuclear weaponry was still in its infancy. The warning comes from Physicians for Civil Defense, which issued...

Russia and the United States will work together to improve protection against meteorites and other space threats, Russia’s emergencies minister said on Tuesday following a joint Russia-US working group meeting in Washington. “We have decided that the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Russia's Emergencies Ministry will work together to develop systems to protect people and territory from cosmic impacts,” Russia’s Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov told journalists. The meeting also covered other kinds of natural emergencies, such as recent years' extreme weather in Russia and United States, but it was cooperation to counter space threats that stole the limelight...

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on how to “better identify and address asteroids that pose a potential threat to Earth,” Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said in a statement on Friday. The announcement comes after a meteorite exploded in a massive blast above Siberia that damaged buildings, houses and cars and injured about 1,000 people on Friday. "The light was so intense that it completely illuminated the courtyard of our apartment block," said Sergei Zakharov, head of the Russian Geographical Society in Chelyabinsk, according to The Wall Street Journal. "The sound, the shock wave came...

Explanation: Where will the next Perseid meteor appear? Sky enthusiasts who trekked outside for the Perseid meteor shower that peaked over the past few days typically had this question on their mind. Six meteors from this past weekend are visible in the above stacked image composite, including one bright fireball streaking along the band of the background Milky Way Galaxy. All Perseid meteors appear to come from the shower radiant in the constellation of Perseus. Early reports about this year's Perseids indicate that as many as 100 meteors per hour were visible from some dark locations during the peak. The...

It took some 10 million years for Earth to recover from the greatest mass extinction of all time, latest research has revealed. Life was nearly wiped out 250 million years ago, with only 10 per cent of plants and animals surviving. It is currently much debated how life recovered from this cataclysm, whether quickly or slowly. Recent evidence for a rapid bounce-back is evaluated in a new review article by Dr Zhong-Qiang Chen, from the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, and Professor Michael Benton from the University of Bristol. They find that recovery from the crisis lasted some 10...

If you enjoy the sight of "shooting stars" then make plans to be out looking skyward during the predawn hours on Wednesday (Jan. 4) when a strong display of Quadrantid meteors may appear. This first meteor shower of the year may end up being one of the best of 2012. To paraphrase Forrest Gump: The Quadrantid meteor shower is like opening up a box of chocolates; you never know what you're going to get! Indeed, the Quadrantids are notoriously unpredictable, but if any year promises a fine display, this could be it. Peak activity is due to occur early on...

A mysterious metal ball reportedly fell from space , landing in a grasslands area of the African nation of Namibia. So far experts claim the object is not of alien origin. It has two bumps on each end, appears to be hollow and weights about 13 pounds.

Explanation: Historically active, this year's Leonid meteor shower was diminished by bright moonlight. Still, faithful night sky watchers did see the shower peak on November 18 and even the glare of moonlight didn't come close to masking this brilliant fireball meteor. The colorful meteor trail and final flare was captured early that morning in western skies over the Canary Island Observatorio del Teide on Tenerife. Particles of dust swept up when planet Earth passes near the orbit of periodic comet Tempel-Tuttle, Leonid meteors typically enter the atmosphere at nearly 70 kilometers per second. Looking away from the Moon, the wide...

QUADRANTID METEOR ALERT: Earth is about to pass through a narrow stream of debris from shattered comet 2003 EH1, source of the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. "Peaking in the wee morning hours of Tuesday, Jan. 4, the Quads have a maximum rate of about 100 per hour (varies between 60 and 200)," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "What makes this year so special is that the Moon is New on the night of the peak, so there will be no interference from moonlight." PARTIAL SOLAR ECLIPSE: After the meteor shower, observers in Europe, northern Africa, the Middle...

AURORAS AND A FIREBALL: This week, the brightest auroras of the year have been surging around the Arctic Circle. Never one to waste a photo-op, English astrophotographer Pete Lawrence boarded a "Northern Lights flight" on Feb. 15th, and this is what he saw 37,000 ft over the Shetland Islands: "The display was awesome and completely occupied the view, illuminating the fuselage and clouds below us in an eerie green light," says Lawrence. "At one point, a brilliant fireball streaked down towards the horizon. If you're wondering why there are two fireball trails, the main one was so bright that it...

For those in a clear and dark part of the world, the Geminids will continue this evening. Rates of 100 meteors per hour, with possible peaks of 140-150 per hour. Geminids are characterized by being slow moving and white, with the possibility of some fairly large fireballs! Happy gazing!

METEOR UPDATE: Perseid meteors are now hitting Earth's upper atmosphere with a speed of 58 to 60 km/s, about 130,000 mph. That's the result of triangulation by a dual-station meteor monitoring system operated by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. Last night the system detected five fireballs that provided the data for this speed estimate... EARLY PERSEIDS: The Perseid meteor shower is slowly intensifying as Earth plunges deeper in Comet Swift-Tuttle's debris stream. On August 4th, amateur astronomer Thomas Ashcraft caught an early arrival using an all-sky camera at his observatory near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Click on the image to play...

Second Loud Boom Rattles Windows In NY May Have Been Meteorite (3/9/2009) There's been another loud "boom." This time it rattled windows in parts of Rockland County. Nanuet resident Keith Wallenstein said the mysterious noise woke him up at about 5:15 Monday morning and sounded like someone had flown an F-16 over his house. An earlier loud "boom" heard in Westchester County early Saturday might have been a meteorite. Police and The Journal News got a flurry of reports from people in Scarsdale, Mount Vernon, Yonkers, Tuckahoe, Eastchester and Bronxville. Weather officials say there was no thunder in the area...

COLORADO SUPERBOLIDE: Last night, Dec. 6th at 1:06 a.m. MST, a meteor of stunning brightness lit up the skies of Colorado. Astronomer Chris Peterson photographed the event using a dedicated all-sky meteor camera in the town of Guffey, near Colorado Springs: Video:http://spaceweather.com/swpod2008/06dec08/Chris-Peterson1_strip.gif?PHPSESSID=s7mlc3ga8e6isub9bapbfqjkp2 "In seven years of operation, this is the brightest fireball I've ever recorded," says Peterson. "I estimate the terminal explosion at magnitude -18, more than 100 times brighter than a full Moon." Fireballs this bright belong to a rare category of meteors called superbolides. They are caused by small asteroids measuring a few to 10 meters in...

The Dark Ages : Were They Darker Than We Imagined? By Greg Bryant Published in the September 1999 issue of Universe As we approach the end of the Second Millennium, a review of ancient history is not what you would normally expect to read in the pages of Universe. Indeed, except for reflecting on the AD 837 apparition of Halley's Comet (when it should have been as bright as Venus and would have moved through 60 degrees of sky in one day as it passed just 0.03 AU from Earth - three times closer than Hyakutake in 1996), you may...

According to the going theory, a six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula 65 million years ago, throwing enough dust up into the atmosphere to dim the sun for years, killing off green plants and triggering a famine that wiped out all the dinosaurs in the geologic blink of an eye. Not so fast, says U.S. Geological Survey geologist emeritus James Fassett. A few years ago, Fassett’s colleagues were digging in a fossil-rich area of New Mexico when they uncovered the four-foot-long fossilized thighbone of a duck-billed, plant-eating hadrosaur in a sandstone cliff. When Fassett dated the bone to half...