Falling Stars for Christmas Earth

 Geminid Meteors over Teide Volcano
Image Credit & Copyright: Juan Carlos Casado (TWAN, Earth and Stars)

Explanation: On some nights it rains meteors. Peaking two nights ago, asteroid dust streaked through the dark skies of Earth, showering down during the annual Geminids meteor shower. Astrophotographer Juan Carlos Casado captured the space weather event, as pictured above, in a series of exposures spanning about 2.3 hours using a wide angle lens.
The snowcapped Teide volcano of the Canary Islands of Spain towers in the foreground, while the picturesque constellation of Orion highlights the background. The star appearing just near the top of the volcano is Rigel.
Although the asteroid dust particles are traveling parallel to each other, the resulting meteor streaks appear to radiate from a single point on the sky, in this case in the constellation of Gemini, off the top of the image. Like train tracks appearing to converge in the distance, the meteor radiant effect is due to perspective. The astrophotographer has estimated that there are about 50 Geminids visible in the above composite image.

I meant to post this yesterday but it was just too hot to think and now I'm too tired to think so I just cut and pasted instead of looking up all the places the piece mentions. Great meteor shower though.

Yesterday I fell over, almost over and I can't begin to tell you how ridiculous the whole thing was and all because I didn't move the lamp table 6 inches. I knelt on the footstool to change the powerboard but couldn't see the switch properly so while I was faffing around, the footstool slid one way and I went the other. Fortunately the wall stopped my head and me from falling completely over the footstool. So it was head in wall, bum in air, left arm on couch, right arm on lamp table, one foot on ground and can't remember where the other foot was. I am hurting in a dozen places still but the powerboard is in place because when I pulled myself back up (and there was snivelling and sobbing) I moved the lamp table 6 inches.
IceBear was such a help, sitting beside his empty dish in the kitchen. He and the possums are not getting on together. Possums were back in the kitchen last night, snouts in the kibble. IB was in the tree, higher up than the possums so when they rolled back out with the apples I gave them, he lept from the top branch and the brawling was on. He finally strolled inside at midnight and plonked in front of the fan.
This morning I was back to Southland, early and I swear I had HoChiMinh driving the taxi. I know he's dead but this guy was driving like he had nothing to lose including his life. Bought everything on the list including a bird bell and I was sorely tempting to write in the food register at the Home, fucking bird bell for fucking parrots, but I contented myself with not writing down the custard tart I had for mum. Lunch was pototato gems and left over chicken thingies from their Christmas party, not even a bit of mayonnaise on the side. I was hungry, I ate them. Mother snarfed the custard tart.
Now I don't have to go there until Christmas Day.
I should go out and clean the water dish for the birds after the brawl in it last night but my knees are hurting. I'm trying not to mention the allergy otherwise the urge to scratch will start up again.
And I'm full of sugar. I just ate the most luscious piece of berry and almond nougat I've ever had, good stuff, it even had rice paper on it so it wouldn't stick to the wrapper. I will be good for dinner, sourdough and olive bruschetta with tomatoes and mozzarella and feta cheese. Then the jewelled Christmas Tree is being made. Hopefully I'll have photos tomorrow.

The sky is almost falling.

That green spot is Comet Lemmon and for more information on the other comet appearing now gohere.  Sky and Telescope also have a great report on the meteorite strike in Russia.  They have sky maps to show where the comet will be and how best to observe it.

Bless those Mayan stone cutters

20/2012 and the end of the World according to the Mayan calendar.  It didn't happen but look at the start of 2013. 
 The Pope resigns and lightning strikes St. Peter's Basilica during a massive storm. Conspiracy theorists come out of the woodwork and say it's photoshopped or was taken on some other stormy day.  It didn't hit the dome but the lightning rod beside the Cross.

A meteor shower hits Russia and this time thanks to iphones and digital cameras, it's all captured for us to see.  We have a couple of meteor showers a year thanks to the debris left by comets as they've passed by but this was unexpected since we were all looking in the direction of this big beast.

The asteroid known as 2012DA14 measuring 150 feet across with a mass of 130,000 metric tonnes.  It skimmed the geostationary orbit of Earth's satellites at 17,450 miles per hour but had nothing to do with the meteor shower since that was going in the opposite direction. So the boffins tell us and we do believe them just like we believe dodgy calendars carved in stone.

Kim Jong Un the Twit of North Korea allows his fellow citizens/slaves/peasants/prisoners to starve to death so he can have a death weapon of his own.  You could say he is the Pestilence of the Four Horsemen of the Appocalypse.

And if we want to really believe in disaster, there is the drugs in football land scandal and the drugs in bike racing scandal and the jockeys betting on horse racing scandal and it's only just starting election year.
 Welcome to the end of life as we know it well not exactly unless God gets really snarky and simultaneously smites every chocolate factory on Earth.

Did I mention there is a huge comet coming at us, so big and bright we'll be able to see it in daylight?  Gadzooks, what a year this is going to be.

It's not a meteorite until it hits us.

This year's November 18 Leonid meteor shower had to cope with bright moonlight but even that didn't stop the photo of this brilliant meteor fireball. Leonid meteors fall at this time every year as the Earth passes through the particles of dust of the Tempel-Tuttle comet.

The image was taken by Juergen Rendtel in the western skies over the Canary Island Observatorio on Tenerife. The smaller insets show the smoke trail of the meteor.

Leonid meteors usually enter the atmosphere at nearly 70 kilometres per second. In the frame are the stars of the constellations Orion and Taurus and that very bright Moon.

Location, location, location

In the Egyptian desert near the Gilf Kebir region at co-ordinates (google earth, look for the end of two long ridges) 22d 1'6.03"N 26d 5'15. 76"E is this wonderful 45 metre wide and 16 metre deep meteorite crater in pristine condition, known as Gebel Kamil.


Scientists believe the impact was a 1.3 metre wide solid iron meteorite weighing 5000 to 10,000 kilograms hitting the earth at a speed exceeding 3.5 kilometres a second.
The impact would have generated a fireball and plume visible over 1000 kilometres.
This is considered a small impact event and the crater is important as, up to now, it was thought a metallic object of this size would beak into smaller pieces before impact. The fact that it stayed intact with the exception of an 83kg chunk found 200 metres away from the crater, means a change of thinking about the destructive power of small impacts instead of concentrating on larger "end of all life" events.

The crater was first noticed by Vincenzo de Michele who was studying earth satellite photographs for ruins of palaeolithic villages. And Egyptian/Italian expedition to the site was amazed to find it in such a well preserved conditon that even the splatter rays of ejected materials were visible. Crater ejecta rays don't go towards the centre of a crater but converge on a point at the rim or just outside it and are used to plot the direction and angle of impact.

Gebel Kamil is considered the best preserved crater so far discovered on earth. Looking at the image above, it is almost lunar like. It's also a young crater as the team found ejected bedrock material overlying prehistoric structures in the area. The geochronology is still being determined but it's les than 10,000 years old, maybe even less than 5,000 when the land became too arid for humans. If less than 5,000 years then it could have been witnessed by prehistoric people and archaeologists are hoping to fix the date by investigating nearby settlements.

The crater was discovered in 2008, explored in 2010. The research team collected over 1,000 kgs of metallic meteorite fragments. The more they collect the better to estimate the size of the meteorite but the market for meteorite rocks is booming and already bits of the Kamil impact are on the market. Once they disappear into private collections, the information they contain is lost to science.

As with archaeological looting, where an object is found, its condition and how many other fragments surround it, is vital to any study.

In trying to protect Gebel Kamil, the exploration team want it listed as a protected site by UNESCO with Egypt preserving not only the crater area but the fragments scattered over the surrounding area.

WHO NEEDS A CHRISTMAS STAR

This image was taken by Bjornar G. Hansen during the December Geminid meteor shower. The meteor flashed through the sky over the island of Kvaloya, near Tromso, Norway on December 13. Not only a meteor flash but also the Aurora Borealis in full glow. The Aurora are caused by energetic charged particles from the magnetosphere at altitudes of 100 kilometres above the earth.

IMPACT IMAGES

This is the Serra da Cangalha Crater in Northern Brazil. It's hidden underneath tropical savanna vegtation, resting on sediments laid down approximately 300 million years ago. Geologists estimate the meteorite struck here about 220 million years ago. The crater's structure shows a series of concentric rings with a diameter of 8 miles and the inner bowl is rimmed by rocks rising about 1,380 feet above the surrounding land.

It took some time to establish Serra da Cangalha as a impact crater. Geologists had to take into account, its circular shape, no volcanic rocks in a drill core and no carbonate or salt layers in nearby sediments which would suggest a salt dome. It also had to have the signs of impact in the form of shatter cones, conical shaped, grooved rocks known only to appear in impact craters.

This image was taken by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite on June 23, 2006. It's a simulated-true-colour image with varying shades of green defining the mix of savanna and riparian forest (forests along a river or stream). The occasional patches of purple-grey mean bare ground.



This is another way to image a crater or potential crater. It's a 3.4 mile wide craterlike formation which is buried 4,900 to 5,250 feet below sea level west of Stockton, California. Rocks in the area date to about 37 to 49 million years. This is from a seismic survey data of the Central Valley region which scientists believe was underwater at that time. More important than the circular shape is rock analysis showing shocked quartz that require a high-shock pressure impact to form.
The Victoria Island structure is being added to a database of suspected impacts along with the 0.8 mile Cowell structure to the north. If this can be proven, it'll be the first crater found in California.

SCIENCE ALWAYS MOVING

A meteorite smashed into a valley in central Italy in AD 312 and a Swedish geology team thinks it might have benefited the Christian church. To the Romans, the meteorite would have looked like a bright flaming object in the sky, even in the daytime and would have struck Earth with the force of a small one-kiloton nuclear bomb and may have even looked like a small nuclear blast with mushroom cloud and shock-waves.

The geologists think the formation of the crater coincided with a celestial vision which church history recorded as having converted the future Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity. Old records say that Constantine was praying when he saw a cross of light in the heavens, above the Sun, inscribed with "conquer by this". This event was witnessed by him and his army just before a decisive battle in the civil war with Maxentius for control of the Roman Empire. Constantine took this as a sign of divine help from the Christian God. He later stopped the persecution of Christians and officially approved their religion.

The geologists were exploring a small crater lake in the Sirente Plain and determined that the round depression had been created about 1700 years earlier. The geologists found the main crater surrounded by numerous small secondary craters gouged out by debris ejected when the rock smashed into the ground. Magnetic anomalies detected around the secondary craters were probably magnetic gragments from the meteorite.
The Sirente crater field consists of about 30 depressions with a main rimmed 120 m-diameter crater. Seismic data from the main crater support the meterorite impact interpretation but there have been other hypotheses.


A close field inspection found that metallic fragments could be sampled in great quantities (photo above) and the sampled iron splinters looked like exploded ordnance. The main crater has been dated but there is still debate about whether some of the smaller craters were the result of WW11 bombing. The ground around the Sirente area is soft and muddy and exploded and unexploded ordnance would penetrate to some distance and show up as magnetic anomalies. This complicates any attempt to retrieve meteorite fragments as digging or drilling anywhere near unexploded bombs would have only one result.
Further magnetic surveys will have to differentiate between these man-made anomalies and rocks from space before a conclusive decision on this crater field is made.