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Viewing Posts from November 2011

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    73X Faster Than a Speeding Bullet!

    On the night of Nov. 17, 2011, NASA cameras captured two super-fast views of Leonid meteors. The first video below shows a Leonid from a NASA camera operated in Tullahoma, Tenn. Moving 73 times faster than a bullet fired from an M-16 rifle, the three-quarter inch meteor first started to burn up 71 miles above …

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    Leonids Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight!

    <DIV The moon is going to be major interference, but we could see a rate about 20 per hour,? said Bill Cooke, Lead of the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA?s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.The annual Leonid meteor shower is expected to reach peak activity tonight, November 17, at about 10:40 p.m. EST....

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    Taurids Dust the November Sky

    The Orionid meteor shower is over, as Earth has finally left the wide stream of debris produced by Comet Halley. However, we are now encountering particles produced by Comet Encke, the second comet to be assigned a name (Halley was the first). This debris wake is much larger, lasting many weeks, causing the Taurid complex …

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    Images of Rare Aurora in Southern Tennessee

     The colors of emitted light within an aurora depend on the initial energy of the charged particles (mostly electrons) cascading into Earth’s atmosphere.  Electrons with higher initial energies are able to penetrate deeper into the atmosphere, whereas those with lower initial energies lose all their energy at higher altitudes. The blue aurora emitted from low-altitude …

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    From Athens to Tuscaloosa — In 3 Seconds!

    MSFC’s all sky meteor camera recorded this bright meteor last night (November 1st) at 9:04 pm CDT. Blazing across the sky at 40 miles per second (144,000 mph), the 1 inch visitor from space took only 3.3 seconds to go 132 miles, starting at a point just northeast of Athens, Alabama and burning up west …

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