Tag: Meteors

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Meteorite-hunting ship picks up promising bits

Marc Fries
Cosmic dust expert Marc Fries examines tiny rock samples from the Pacific seafloor. (Ocean Exploration Trust / Nautilus Live Photo / Susan Poulton)

A research ship has recovered at least two bits of molten rock from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that scientists say could have come from a meteorite.

The preliminary findings are the result of an unprecedented survey conducted this week by the Exploration Vessel Nautilus in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, about 15 miles (25 kilometers) off the coast of Washington state.

If scientists are correct, the two flecks of rock identified today could be the first pieces of a meteorite recovered from the ocean after its descent was observed.

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Moon upstages Quadrantid meteor shower

Quadrantids
A Quadrantid fireball lights up the sky. (Jimmy Westlake Photo via NASA / Colorado Mountain College)

The good news is that the annual Quadrantid meteor shower is reaching its peak tonight with relatively clear skies in the forecast for Western Washington. The bad news? It’ll be hard to spot shooting stars, due to the night-long glare from a moon that’s just past its super-sized full phase.

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Prime time for the Geminid meteor shower

Image: Geminids
A Geminid meteor makes an impression in an all-sky photo captured in 2011. (Credit: NASA)

This year’s Geminid meteor shower is reaching its peak, and Seattle’s weather just might cooperate.

Tonight’s forecast calls for partly cloudy skies and a low chance of precipitation, which is unusual for a Seattle holiday season.

That adds to the allure for this year’s Geminid display, which is expected to be out of the ordinary.

“With August’s Perseids obscured by bright moonlight, the Geminids will be the best shower this year,” Bill Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said in a news release. “The thin, waning crescent moon won’t spoil the show.”

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Hopes rise for a gem of a Geminid meteor shower

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A Geminid meteor makes an impression in an all-sky photo captured in 2011. (Credit: NASA)

The buildup has begun for this year’s best meteor shower, the Geminids, and what makes it even better is that Seattle’s weather just might cooperate.

For the week leading up to the Geminids’ peak on the night of Dec. 13-14, the forecast calls for partly cloudy skies and a low chance of precipitation, which is unusual for a Seattle holiday season.

That adds to the allure for this year’s Geminid display, which is expected to be out of the ordinary.

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Watch a fireball light up Seattle’s skies

Meteor flash
The greenish streak just to the left of the streetlight in this dashcam video marks the flash of a fireball. (Michael Lee via YouTube)

Dozens of reports have streamed in about a fireball that was seen in the skies over Washington state, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia on March 16.

The American Meteor Society’s online tracker lists more than 70 reports from locales over a wide area, ranging southward to Eugene, Ore., northward to Vancouver and Enderby, B.C., and eastward to Grangeville, Idaho. Most of the reports were registered around 9:40 p.m.

Michael Lee, one of the founders of the Seattle-based Jobscan resume service, captured the pop and flash of the fireball in a dashcam video.

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Relive the peak of the Perseid meteor shower

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Perseid meteors flash with the Milky Way as a backdrop. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)

Crowds of skywatchers turned the peak of the Perseid meteor shower into a mass spectator event overnight – and you can catch an encore presentation this weekend, if you know where to go.

For me, last night’s arena was Rattlesnake Lake, about 35 miles east of Seattle. Cars were lined up for miles along the blacktop leading off from Interstate 90’s Exit 34, even though it was 1 o’clock in the morning.

That’s just about the time the moon set, leaving the stage of the clear, black sky open for the meteor performance. My stargazing friend and I settled in right at the lake’s edge, along with hundreds of other people scattered in the darkness. We saw roughly one meteor a minute: Sometimes they came in bunches. Sometimes we just waited and stared. And sometimes we’d miss a flash, only to hear the “oooh” rising up from the surrounding crowd of skywatchers.

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Perseid meteor shower should pack extra punch

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A composite view from an all-sky camera in Chickamauga, Ga., shows Perseid meteors flashing on the night of Aug. 11, 2010. (Credit: NASA / MSFC / Meteoroid Environment Office)

August’s Perseid meteor shower is always one of the most accessible sky spectaculars of the year, but this year’s show is expected to be even more spectacular than usual.

The meteoric display is due to reach its peak on the night of Aug. 11, heading into the morning of Aug. 12. But you should be able to see shooting stars all this week, assuming the skies are clear. The best time is after moonset, which occurs around 1 a.m. on the peak night.

The Perseids pop up every year, reaching their height around Aug. 11-13. That’s when Earth passes through a stream of cosmic grit left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle. When those flecks of grit streak through the upper atmosphere, they ionize the surrounding air and create the flashes we know and love.

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Chinese space junk sparks meteor reports

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YouTube user Ian Norman captured this view of the fireball in the skies over Alabama Hills, Calif. (Credit: Ian Norman via YouTube)

A bright streak in the sky generated hundreds of meteor sighting reports from Southern California to British Columbia, but it didn’t take long for the flash to be traced to the re-entry of a Chinese rocket stage.

The fireball was seen across a wide swath of the western United States between 9:30 and 10 p.m. PT Wednesday. More than a dozen Washington state observers on the east side of the Cascades filed reports with the American Meteor Society. But Western Washington? Not so much, probably because of sighting angles as well as sky conditions.

The fireball’s trajectory matched up with the track of a second-stage booster from a Chinese Long March 7 rocket that was launched on Monday. This launch sent up several experiments and satellites, but it also served as an initial flight test for a vehicle that’s expected to send payloads to China’s present and future space stations.

The U.S. military’s Joint Space Operations Center confirmed that the rocket stage fell through the atmosphere and broke up as it passed over California and Nevada, heading eastward.

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Meteors bring holiday cheer – if it’s clear

Image: Geminids
A Geminid meteor makes an impression in an all-sky photo captured in 2011. (Credit: NASA)

The most reliable meteor shower of the year reaches its peak tonight – but to catch the Geminids, you’ll have to find a patch of clear, dark sky.

That’s difficult to do in the Seattle area. There’s a glimmer of hope, however: Theweather outlook improves as Sunday night turns into Monday morning, and it gets a lot better by Monday night. With any luck, there’ll still be some Geminids to see. So let’s assume you do find clear skies sometime in the next couple of days.

The Geminids appear every year from Dec. 4 to 17. They peak on Dec. 13-14, when Earth passes right through the trail of cosmic grit and pebbles left behind by an asteroid or burned-out comet called 3200 Phaeton. When those bits of debris pass through the upper atmosphere, they leave bright meteoric trails behind.

This year is a good one because the crescent moon makes an early exit, leaving a nice glare-less sky to look up into. Under peak conditions, you could see as many as 100 meteors per hour, including showy fireballs.

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