* Astronomy

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RE: Meteors

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Meteor showers look pretty in the night time sky, caused by space rocks as big as 30 feet across streaking across the heavens. But Close and colleagues have diagnosed a previously unsuspected way that even the humblest bit of space dust - as small as four-thousandths of an inch across - may end up zapping satellite electronics. These bits of comets and asteroids routinely swoop down on Earth at speeds ranging from 24,600 to 160,000 miles-per-hour, much faster than the orbital zip of most satellites.
For fans of categorising stuff, I should probably mention that meteoroids are what space rocks are called when they are flying through space, meteors are what they are called when they are burning through the sky, and meteorites are what they are called after they land. Any meteoroid much bigger than 30 feet across is generally dubbed by astronomers as an asteroid, or else a comet.
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Sandia Allsky Compilation of Persieds

Compilation of all Sandia Allsky Triggers from 8-14 August.

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Meteor Live View

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Stargazers' Guide: Just what is a meteor shower?

Before getting started on meteor showers, it may be best to take a minute to explain the difference between a meteor and a meteorite. The difference is whether it makes it to the ground or not. Outer space is filled with trillions of very small rocks and dust particles, and Earth is constantly being hit by this space dust. Scientists tell us that we run into 400 tons of this dust every day.
When these specks of dust hit Earth's atmosphere, they burn up, which is what causes the "shooting stars" that we sometimes see at night.
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Title: Video observation of Geminids 2010 and Quadrantids 2011 by SVMN and CEMeNt
Authors: Jutaj Tóth, Peter Vere, Leonard Korno, Roman Piffl, Jakub Koukal, tefan Gajdo, Ivan Majchrovic, Pavol Zigo, Martin Zima, Jozef Világi, Duan Kalmancok

Since 2009 the double station meteor observation by the all-sky video cameras of the Slovak Video Meteor Network (SVMN) brought hundreds of orbits. Thanks to several amateur wide field video stations of the Central European Meteor Network (CEMeNt) and despite not an ideal weather situation we were able to observe several Geminid and Quadrantid multi-station meteors during its 2010 and 2011 maxima, respectively. The presented meteor orbits derived by the UFOOrbit software account a high precision of the orbital elements and are very similar to those of the SonotaCo video meteor database.

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