Asteroids

[Allen]

For those of you in astronomy do you know if there is an increase in asteroid activity or are we just seeing and tracking them better and sooner?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/potentially-hazardous-asteroid-bigger-building-121454056.html

[PWC]

The latter. We have no way to know what we didn't know. Now we can be "concerned" about it.

[dryheat]

The universe is a mess in some places. There's rock and dust. No one seems to know how many tons of cosmic dust fall on earth daily. Most of the "shooting stars" you see are just little grains of sand. The Barringer crater in AZ was made by a 300 ton meteor. It killed everything for five miles. The Chicxulub crater was hit millions of years ago by a meteor ten miles in diameter and "helped" kill off 85% of life on Earth at the time. But the good news is, things have settled down considerable over the last billion years or so.

[dogtag]

Big question is: is the Universe in a state of entropy, or is it organised even though it appears to be chaotic?
Earth might seem chaotic but everything seems to somehow have a symbiotic relationship.

[Vern Humphrey]

Entropy is defined as "a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system."

Earth is not chaotic -- because it is constantly receiving energy from an external source (the Sun.) This allows things to grow and flourish.

[one shot]

https://youtu.be/cU5Ssh52PGg We do have the Space Force . https://youtu.be/__8f-HDai64

[Merc]

A meteor caused a large sonic boom over Pittsburgh on New Year’s Day. It exploded and broke apart when it entered the earth’s atmosphere. We had a thick cloud deck at the time so it wasn’t observed.

https://nypost.com/2022/01/04/meteor-explosion-over-pittsburgh-was-as-powerful-as-30-tons-of-tnt/

[dryheat]

A meteor caused a large sonic boom over Pittsburgh on New Year?s Day. It exploded and broke apart when it entered the earth?s atmosphere. We had a thick cloud deck at the time so it wasn?t observed.

https://nypost.com/2022/01/04/meteor-explosion-over-pittsburgh-was-as-powerful-as-30-tons-of-tnt/

That gets my hair up. I've witnesses about four Earth Grazers but I've never been properly stranced to photogragh one and I purposely go out to get shots of meteors.
The New Years day meteor from about ten yrs. ago;
I hate New Years for the fireworks when I'm trying to sleep so I go out somewhere to camp. Right after dinner I'm leaning against the quad with a drink and this meteor go blasting from south to north. Perfect. It was about the size of a baseball. It made the news.
Sky watching for cool stuff is like fishing. It's not always catching.

[Merc]

That gets my hair up. I've witnesses about four Earth Grazers but I've never been properly stranced to photogragh one and I purposely go out to get shots of meteors.
The New Years day meteor from about ten yrs. ago;
I hate New Years for the fireworks when I'm trying to sleep so I go out somewhere to camp. Right after dinner I'm leaning against the quad with a drink and this meteor go blasting from south to north. Perfect. It was about the size of a baseball. It made the news.
Sky watching for cool stuff is like fishing. It's not always catching.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

You’ve probably visited the “Meteor Crater” in the high desert near Winslow, AZ. According to the attached article, the crater is about 50,000 years old and is probably the best preserved meteor crater on earth due to the lack of erosion. They figured the meteor was about 160 feet in diameter and it produced a crater that’s about 3/4 mile in diameter. We visited it several years ago and we were impressed.

There’s lots to see in that part of AZ.

Not far from the Meteor Crater is “The Petrified Forest National Park.” It’s the largest collection of naturally occurring petrified logs in the world. Most of the wood is 4-6 foot long sections of tree trunks that are between 3-4 feet in diameter. Nearly all of the sections are scattered around but there is one very long tree where the sections are still aligned, so it remains where it fell millions of years ago. We spent nearly a day there wandering through the park.

The “Grand Canyon” is not too much further up the road and is really impossible to fully comprehend the magnitude of the force that created it - The Colorado River and erosion.

To view all of these natural wonders by day is only half the story. Viewing the sky on a clear night is the other half. It is probably one of the darkest areas in the US. Looking at the sky through an average pair of binoculars reveals millions of stars that are out there unseen with the naked eye and the Milky Way is clearly visible.

We’ll be returning to Cave Creek, AZ in April for a few days to visit my horse and we might take a day to visit the high desert again to re-visit some of these natural wonders.