i have a basic metal detector, and i live in semi- desert area. i would like to know what are my chanses of findong a meteor. thank you.
127513
odds are pretty low, the number of "meteorites" that are on the earth is pretty low compared to other rocks. That being said hey why not try it. At the very least you can learn alot about different types of rocks. This can be a very rewarding hobby and you could spend years looking for different types of cool rocks to add to your collection. I say go for it. You may even make some money off it if you find some jewelry and coins. HOWEVER finding micro meteorites is fairly easy!!!\nhere are a couple sites detailing how to go about it\n\nhttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/activities/3111_origins.html\n\nhttp://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.net/mag/artmar06/rh-Micromets-1.html
403695
There are lots of meteor shower Web sites out there, but the very best Web site for getting your directions straight and seeing some awesome satellites (including the International Space Station quite often) is called Heavens Above.  Just plug in any location for any time and it will give you superb constellation, planet and satellite path maps.  Note: If you print out the maps, be sure to hold them above you because the printout is aligned so that you hold it above you as you're looking up at the stars at the same time.  Superb data presented in a simple and fun format.
516909
They burn up in the atmosphere.  Meteors are brilliant flashes in the night sky. They travel 60,000 km per hr.  At those speeds friction with air particles vaporizes an average size meteor in less that a second. The flash of light is caused by the intense heat of vaporization. Only on rare occasions a chunk large enough to survive the plunge hits the ground.  This is called a meteorite. The largest meteorites surviving the plunge do damage the surface of the earth and cause craters but this  rarely ever happens. You probably wont ever see it in your lifetime.
462514
I would try checking the meteorobs mailing list. And perhaps posting about your sighting to the list.\n\nhttp://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/meteorobs/\n\nThere's also a fireball log here:\n\nhttp://www.amsmeteors.org/fireball/fireball_log2006.html\n\nUpdate: Turns out you weren't alone. There's a bunch of sightings posted in the fireball log I posted above as well as an update that was posted to spaceweather.com\n\n"On Nov. 28th, in a split-second of total coincidence, a meteoroid the same size as the Lunar Leonid plunged to Earth over the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. What happened? Nothing. It disintegrated harmlessly in the atmosphere. A local security camera captured this movie of the beautiful fireball."\n\nAnd here's the movie they are referring to:\n\nhttp://science.nasa.gov/spaceweather/swpod2006/03dec06/huntsville.asf
253768
Oh no, you've figured out my hoax!!! You busted me, you're right, its not round. Sorry, I get silly sometimes. If you are at a position when the moon passes directly perpendicular to you relative to the sun's position then you will see a perfect half lit moon. you can simulate this with a big right triangle by taking a golf ball or some other ball and placing it at the  90 degree corner and placing a flashlight at one of the other corners pointing directly at the ball. Now line up your sight from the third corner and you should see a perfect half lit ball. :)
174116
yeh, a meteorit and a galaxy are coming to earth. Don't worry, they come only after 2 milion years...;))
222328
ok there are solar flares that reach us but earth's magnetic field sort of protects us.\nso what we need is a combo of some sort\nso how about we go for\nEarth's magnetic pole flipping\nSolar flare(big) or solar increase\nMeteor\nComet\nput them all in the blender and mix\n\nso at the same time the magnetic pole flips\nthe field will drop to zero(not sure on how long)\nat this time a solar flare hits us making the entire sky look like the northern lights(very beautiful at sun set)\nbecause the atmosphere starts to ionize.\nand on the night side a comet heading straight for earth\nbut the comet is over taken by a large meteor that smashes the comet creating a lot of small comets of ice and rock and one mostly untouched meteor about 150-200km or larger in diameter. the meteor can crash in the middle of the pacific right on top of hawaii taking it out and creating a large tsunami that kills most of the people in the costal areas. then the ice covered meteors from the comet will at some time over the next 48 hours end up taking out most of the major urban centers of the world and the farms as well.\nalso the ensuing earthquakes can completely teraform the landscape in to a more mountainous terrain.\nand the electro magnetic serge caused by the solar flare launches all of the armaments across the globe at random GPS co-ordinates.(nuklear, chemical, biological, ETC...)\n\nhows that for a disaster waiting to happen.
73449
The term meteor comes from the Greek meteoron, meaning phenomenon in the sky. It is used to describe the streak of light produced as matter in the solar system falls into Earth's atmosphere creating temporary incandescence resulting from atmospheric friction. This typically occurs at heights of 80 to 110 kilometers (50 to 68 miles) above Earth's surface. The term is also used loosely with the word meteroid referring to the particle itself without relation to the phenomena it produces when entering the Earth's atmosphere. A meteoroid is matter revolving around the sun or any object in interplanetary space that is too small to be called an asteroid or a comet. Even smaller particles are called micrometeoroids or cosmic dust grains, which includes any interstellar material that should happen to enter our solar system. A meteorite is a meteoroid that reaches the surface of the Earth without being completely vaporized.
462455
There are lots of spectacular still images of meteor showers (just do a google Image search "meteor shower").  \n\nShooting stars (meteors) are, of course, very hard to capture on video because you have to be pointing the camera in the right direction, and because video cameras are not designed to capture such small amounts of light.\n\nBut here's a video that showed on Australian news:\nhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3671895688125716111&q=shooting+star&hl=en\n\nAnd here's a fantastic *daylight* meteor in the Arizona desert.\nhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2680041612603684620&q=shooting+star&hl=en\n\nAnd here's one over Stonehenge (just a glimpse of the shooting star ... but hey, it's Stonehenge):\nhttp://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=shooting%20star&btnG=Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=iv
290910
There are several types of lightning, but to cut to the quick, dust in the atmosphere at the time of the storm has a lot to do with the color of lightning you see.  For instance, if a thunderstorm were to roll across the desert region of Arizona, dust will inevitabbly be kicked up by the storm and may cause the lightning to appear red or orange.  A lack of particles in the air may show up as white lightning.  (Not like the Burt Reynolds movie "White Lightning" which of course is Moonshine, but once it hits ya, you'll think you've been hit by lightning!)  The amount of precipitation in the air at the time may make it appear to be blue.  Also, hail in the clouds can have an effect on it's color too.  But whatever the color, whether it's cloud to ground or ground to cloud you can be sure of one thing, it CAN kill you.  On a side note, about 15 years ago I had a co-worker (Julio) that was working on his car and lightning struck the ground just twenty feet from him.  Of course it rattled him up a bit and a day or two in the hospital under observation was neccessary.  We were heavy equipment operators at the time (bulldozers, dumptrucks, maintainers etc.).  The day he came back to work, everybody was at the shop where we met every morning for a daily brainstorming session.  We all knew about the incident and the mechanic, a man pushing 60 years in age, interrupted us as he was working on a piece of equipment and hollered out "Hey Julio, this battery's dead, can you come over  here and hold on to the loose end of these jumper cables?" We thought it was absolutely hilarious.  That is, everybody except Julio.  I've included a link to information you may find useful.  I'm a trained weather spotter for the NWS and found this link and the links on this page most helpful.
457210
It mostly depends on the direction the meteor comes from and how fast it was before entering Earths atmosphere (although because of resistance of air the speed cannot exeed a certain velocity - I'd say >1000 miles per hour - before it breaks up into pieces), then it depends on where it hits the surface of the ocean ( if it's next to you - not as bad as 5 miles offshore )\nso to say the deeper the water is the more likely is a tsunami\n\nUnderwater earthquakes are even harder .... It depends on the force of the Earthquake, it's epicentrum and then of course how deep the water is....\n\n\nbut to take likely figures I'd say the meteor should have 1 mile diameter to destroy the west coast - or at least a part of it\nthen the earthquake mush be somewhere around 6 to 7 on Richter scala\n\n\nwhy do you ask - are you on a apocalyptical trip, if so you've forgotten about the supervolcano in Yellowstone
68401
Shooting stars form first in the mesosphere, which is about 50-80 km above sea level.\n\nIf we look for a maximum, we assume you are at sea with no obstructions on the horizon, the meteor begins glowing at 80km, and is infinitely bright, and appears for a split second right at the horizon, then it could be as far away as about 1,400 km (around 900 miles).  Changing the height from 80 to 50 km lowers that distance to 1,100 km or 700 miles.\n\nHowever, that just frames an unlikely maximum distance for a shooting star of incredible brightness.  I'd wager it's likely that most shooting stars are far too dim to be seen from such a distance, and any necessary inclination above the horizon necessarily lowers that distance a bit.  (I can't calculate much on that, however, because I don't have a calculator handy that can do the trig functions).
404012
This could be a reason:\n\nMoon Storms\n\nAn old Apollo experiment is telling researchers something new and surprising about the moon.\n\nDecember 7, 2005: Every lunar morning, when the sun first peeks over the dusty soil of the moon after two weeks of frigid lunar night, a strange storm stirs the surface.\n\nThe next time you see the moon, trace your finger along the terminator, the dividing line between lunar night and day. That's where the storm is. It's a long and skinny dust storm, stretching all the way from the north pole to the south pole, swirling across the surface, following the terminator as sunrise ceaselessly sweeps around the moon.\n\nNever heard of it? Few have. But scientists are increasingly confident that the storm is real.\n\nThe evidence comes from an old Apollo experiment called LEAM, short for Lunar Ejecta and Meteorites. "Apollo 17 astronauts installed LEAM on the moon in 1972," explains Timothy Stubbs of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "It was designed to look for dust kicked up by small meteoroids hitting the moon's surface." \n\nRight: The box in the foreground is the Lunar Ejecta and Meteorites Experiment (LEAM). [More]\n\nBillions of years ago, meteoroids hit the moon almost constantly, pulverizing rocks and coating the moon's surface with their dusty debris. Indeed, this is the reason why the moon is so dusty. Today these impacts happen less often, but they still happen.\n\nApollo-era scientists wanted to know, how much dust is ejected by daily impacts? And what are the properties of that dust? LEAM was to answer these questions using three sensors that could record the speed, energy, and direction of tiny particles: one each pointing up, east, and west.\n\nLEAM's three-decade-old data are so intriguing, they're now being reexamined by several independent groups of NASA and university scientists. Gary Olhoeft, professor of geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, is one of them:\n\n\n"To everyone's surprise," says Olhoeft, "LEAM saw a large number of particles every morning, mostly coming from the east or west--rather than above or below--and mostly slower than speeds expected for lunar ejecta."\n\nWhat could cause this? Stubbs has an idea: "The dayside of the moon is positively charged; the nightside is negatively charged." At the interface between night and day, he explains, "electrostatically charged dust would be pushed across the terminator sideways," by horizontal electric fields. (Learn more: "Moon Fountains." ) \nEven more surprising, Olhoeft continues, a few hours after every lunar sunrise, the experiment's temperature rocketed so high--near that of boiling water--that "LEAM had to be turned off because it was overheating."\n\nThose strange observations could mean that "electrically-charged moondust was sticking to LEAM, darkening its surface so the experiment package absorbed rather than reflected sunlight," speculates Olhoeft.\n\nBut nobody knows for sure. LEAM operated for a very short time: only 620 hours of data were gathered during the icy lunar night and a mere 150 hours of data from the blazing lunar day before its sensors were turned off and the Apollo program ended.\n\nAstronauts may have seen the storms, too. While orbiting the Moon, the crews of Apollo 8, 10, 12, and 17 sketched "bands" or "twilight rays" where sunlight was apparently filtering through dust above the moon's surface. This happened before each lunar sunrise and just after each lunar sunset. NASA's Surveyor spacecraft also photographed twilight "horizon glows," much like what the astronauts saw.\n\n\n\nIt's even possible that these storms have been spotted from Earth: For centuries, there have been reports of strange glowing lights on the moon, known as "lunar transient phenomena"
170650
Actually I was working on a cloaking device.  I never built a prototype though because the raw materials would have costed me $1000.  Plus, there are several different types of metal detectors and each one has to be fooled in a slightly different fashion.  If you really want to know, just buy a cheap metal detector and see if you can fool it.  I think it can be done.  If you find a way to bypass those blatently unconstitutional airport checkpoints you've got my full support.
323102
Quartz itself does not contain metal. Quartz is a crystal. What you've found is not pure quartz if a metal detector is picking it up. It's mixed with a metal, and that could be anything, depending on where you live. It's probably iron, since that's a pretty common metal to find lying around (not in a pure form, of course).\nBut go ahead and smash them apart if you feel like it.  You might just find some reddish stuff (iron) or maybe you've gotten lucky and managed to find some quartz that fused with gold or something.
309180
hard to say. i found lots of things in the desert. my husband is a geologist. if you mail me a picture, i will have him look at it.\nthere is lot of crystal stuff in egyptian deserts, most are worthless unless you enjoy it as decoration in your house. does it has a greenish tone in the bottom of the crystals? i have lots of them. it depends also where you found it. if it was near a roman settlement, it could be ancient glass, but if it scratch glass now, i doubt it. i found lots of this, but not this big of a piece, that would be uncommon. tell me more about it, maybe i can help you.\n\nsend me a picture...susuegypt@hotmail.com
437848
There was a meteor shower the last few days, but those happen about once a month or so, with varying intensities, so nothing new there really.  I think there's no reason to think there's a correlation between your animal's behaviour and cosmic events (since there has never been shown to have a correlation before, except during solar eclipses).  Check their food or any stressful factors instead before trying to blame the universe.