Saturday, August 13, 2011

ALERT! ALERT! EARTH IS PASSING THROUGH THE DEBRIS TRAIL OF A COMET!


2010 Perseid Meteor Shower Composite

Just kidding!  =D  There's nothing to be alarmed about!  Some doomsayers have stated that we are going to go through the debris trail of comet Elenin, we're not, but even if we were I just wanted to take a moment to say that we do that all the time.  We go through the debris trails of comets dozens of times each year.  Right now we are going through the debris trail of comet 109P Swift-Tuttle.  This happens every year at this time and is what's known as the Perseids meteor shower.  The peek activity is currently happening at the time of this writing and this meteor shower is one of the better ones that happen each year as far as the level of activity.  If you're reading this and it is nighttime wherever you are you can go out and see the meteoroids hitting the upper atmosphere right now.  The meteoroids are mainly sand sized particles from the tail of comet Swift-Tuttle.  When these meteoroids hit the atmosphere and burn up from friction we change the name to meteors and if any are big enough to make it to the ground, rare, we call them meteorites.  The moon, as you'll notice, is reflecting a lot of light right now so this will make it hard to see most of the meteors, but give it a shot and see what you can see.  I'll be out looking too, off and on tonight.  If you're in the daylight, that's ok, got ya covered with this live shot of the sky complements of NASA.


Oh, and if you're in the US and you see a sparkly light going pretty fast moving from horizon to horizon, that is not a UFO, that's the International Space Station.  =)




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