Meteors

The annual Leonid meteor shower, hotly anticipated by many stargazers, will peak overnight around midnight on the West Coast. During the height of this year's shower, experts expect to see roughly 15 to 20 meteors per hour, though such predictions have been known to be off by quite a bit. And while that number is much lower than in some years - the Leonid, in its prime, involves more than 1,000 meteors per hour - the conditions this year look...

Pull out the reclining lawn chairs and get yourself to the darkest area you can find: The Eta Aquarid meteor shower is peaking this weekend, and if you get lucky, you can catch up to 30 "shooting stars" per hour. You may also want to set your alarm clock: Sky watchers say the best time to catch the light show is in the hour or two just before dawn on Sunday. Here in Southern California that means you'll want to start your meteor hunting around 4 a.m. The Eta Aquarid meteor shower occurs each year in late April or early May when the Earth passes through a stream of dust and debris left in the wake of Halley's Comet.

The Perseid meteor shower -- that annual summertime favorite -- is back this weekend. And it's expected to be spectacular. The stars have aligned, so to speak, to enhance viewing Friday night and Saturday night when the Perseid meteor shower will be at its finest. The shower, which lasts from Aug. 10 through Aug. 13, is widely considered to be the best of the year, says the astronomy website EarthSky. One tip: Try not to blink. "The Perseids are typically fast and bright meteors," EarthSky says . Tweet us your Perseid photos at #LATPerseid The waning crescent moon is one of the many reasons why viewing conditions are especially good this weekend.

Hey there, tenacious sky watchers: Forecasters say the Lyrid meteor shower will peak late Sunday night and into Monday morning, so set your alarm clocks and gather your blankets. You've got a show to watch. The Lyrid meteor shower takes place each April as our planet passes through debris left by the tail of the Comet Thatcher. The meteors are actually little bits of that debris, often no larger than a grain of sand, that burn up in  Earth's atmosphere, causing light to streak across the sky.  Photos: Amazing images from space The Lyrid meteor shower was first recorded more than 2,000 years ago by Chinese astronomers who wrote that "stars fell like rain," according to Sky and Telescope .  These days, however, the Lyrids are decidedly less dramatic.

Firefighters in Colorado have battled the odds in trying to contain a blaze that has burned uncontrolled across 100 square miles of forest -- encountering precarious winds, heat and fatigue. On Wednesday, they contended with a new force: meteors. Authorities grounded firefighting aircraft as a precautionary measure after several reported meteor sightings near the High Park fire area they were trying to contain. PHOTOS: U.S. wildfires 2012 Chaffee County Sheriff W. Peter Palmer told the Los Angeles Times that his office received four reports of meteors striking the ground.

Scores of Orange County residents this weekend will be staying up late--staring transfixed into space. The occasion is the annual sky spectacle called the Perseid Meteor Shower. Rapid streaks of light--popularly but incorrectly called "shooting stars"--will be flashing across the evening skies tonight and will continue through early Tuesday morning. "It's a beautiful sight," said Patrick So, an astronomy lecturer at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. "It's definitely worth watching."

A giant meteor shower bombarded the skies, but telecommunications satellites escaped undamaged from the celestial fireworks. Defense chiefs and communications firms from Britain to Moscow to Luxembourg, which had feared that the satellites' mirrors could be smashed, said their equipment was intact. Israeli astronomers were treated to one of the most spectacular displays of the so-called Leonid meteors, but scientists across northern Europe saw little because of thick clouds.

A layer of rock as thin as a finely honed knife blade has led researchers to conclude that a meteor impact is responsible for a massive global extinction 380 million years ago, similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Brooks B.

The Quadrantid meteor shower will peak Sunday in the hours before dawn. Only the brightest meteors will be seen, however, because of the almost-full moon. The meteors will appear to come from a point near the end of the handle of the Big Dipper.

Thousands of meteors--debris left behind by a comet more than two centuries ago--flamed through the Earth's atmosphere early Sunday, delighting sky watchers across Southern California. Atop Mt. Wilson, hundreds of cars clogged the road leading to the observatory high above the Los Angeles Basin, as stargazers sought out a dark spot to watch as the sky appeared to rain light. Elsewhere in the Angeles National Forest, turnouts were jammed with stargazing motorists.

What will you be doing at 9 p.m. Wednesday night? If you were fascinated by the meteor that streaked across the Russian sky last month -- briefly outshining the sun -- then you should plan to watch "Nova" on PBS.  Wednesday's episode of the excellent science documentary series is devoted to the bizarre case of what's come to be known as the Chelyabinsk meteor (named for the Siberian city it passed over).  For those who need a brief refresher course, this huge space rock originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and somehow wound up orbiting the sun in a trajectory that put it on a collision course with Earth.

A large meteor lit up the night sky across the East Coast, leading hundreds of dazzled spectators to report sightings in more than a dozen states. The event was not unusual but was widely reported because it happened across a populated area on a Friday night, said Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office. “There was a lot of people out and it got everyone's attention,” Cooke told the Los Angeles Times. The meteor was reported at about 8 p.m. EDT. It was probably the size of a boulder, about one yard across, and was bright enough to be classified as a fireball, Cooke said.

Colombian scientists have reconstructed the interplanetary path of a meteor that flamed across the Russian skyline this month and smashed into the countryside, leaving hundreds of people injured. The meteor, estimated to be about 45 feet across and weighing 10,000 tons, was flung toward Earth as it orbited around the sun. It wasn't a declaration of war by bugs on Klendathu after all. Apparently, it was just a matter of time before it hit, researchers concluded in a study published this week on ArXiv.org.

If you thought that asteroid that scorched through the Russian sky last week was something out of the ordinary, think again. An interactive map that's going viral shows the location, size, and chemical makeup of every asteroid and meteor that has slammed into the Earth since 2,300 BC. If only we had dashboard cameras back then to capture the very first one! The map was created by Javier de la Torre, a blogger in New York and cofounder of mapping company CartoDB.

Imagine you're driving to work one day when a blazing meteor streaks across the horizon and explodes into a fireball. You'd be pretty shocked, and might even blurt out an expletive or two, right? That's what most of us, including Jon Stewart, would assume. But apparently that's not the case in Russia, where a 10,000-ton space rock lit up the sky last week , injuring hundreds and releasing as much energy as 30 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs -- or, as the locals call it, "Friday.

The sky is falling! Florida residents reported seeing a flickering light falling off the state's eastern coast Sunday night, raising curiosity over whether Earth has played host to yet another meteor. Crowdsourced reports on the American Meteor Society's website generally stated the falling light happened sometime after 6:30 p.m. local time, with sightings from Cocoa, Fla., all the way down to Miami. NBC-6 in Miami showed witness video of a falling, flickering light, burning brighter and moving slower than most small shooting stars.

The annual Leonid meteor shower returns this week, with the peak meteor intensities occurring tonight and Friday night. The optimal viewing periods will begin at 11 p.m. each night, with the number of meteors peaking between midnight and 1:30 a.m. Information about how much meteor activity will be visible from a given location is available at leonid.arc.nasa.gov. Last year's Leonid shower was heavily studied by NASA and revealed some surprises.

MOSCOW -- Russian scientists declared Monday that they have found and established the composition of pieces of the meteor that exploded over the Chelyabinsk region last week, injuring hundreds of people and causing millions of dollars worth of damage. Over the weekend, 53 tiny pieces of dark porous material were collected near Chebarkul Lake, 60 miles west of Chelyabinsk, the regional center, officials said. The biggest of the finds was 7 millimeters long. The samples were without doubt meteorites, Viktor Grokhovsky, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences meteorite committee, said early Monday.

The 10-ton meteor that streaked into Earth's atmosphere at 40,000 mph and exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk was a reminder that the universe is not such a hospitable place. Still, though hundreds of people were injured and thousands of windows were shattered, no one died and repairs can be made. By comparison, the terrestrial havoc wrought by Hurricane Sandy in the northeastern United States was far more devastating.  In the movies, when humanity is faced with imminent doom, whether from a massive asteroid or an invasion of space monsters, the people of the world forget their differences, band together and save themselves.