Did any major events occur when Comet Encke appeared? If yes what were they?
116198
Encke is believed to be the origin of the Taurid Meteor shower.\n\nIn terms of direct impact on Earth, it is theorized that Encke is the remains of a larger comet that split apart during the Bronze Age with the other chunk landing in the Fertile Crescent.  Evidence of this is an impact crater in Iraq.\n\nAnother theory is that the swastika symbol, which is found in variants in ancient cultures all over the world, was a representation of how Encke appeared with four 'arms' spiraling from its central nucleus.
3840
Wikipedia has an excellent article on this.  According to them, there are 3 main theories:\n\n1. Asteroid collision\n\nBasically a huge rock hit our planet causing a plum of sediment to float into our atmosphere reducing light from the sun.  This reduction killed off a huge portion of the existing plant life, thus wiping out the food supply for many animals.  As one thing leads to another, massive extinctions followed.\n\n2. The Oort cloud\n\nSimilar to the asteroid theory, an Oort cloud is a literal storm of comets.  The results follow pretty closely with the single asteroid theory.\n\n3. Environment changes\n\nThis is a little more vague, but also a little simpler to prove to a degree (pun intended).  The theory follows the notion of the magnetic poles flipping (causing tremendous weather changes), or some other massive event (such as the melting of the caps, or an ice age) that would in turn kill off most of the larger species on the planet.\n\nFor further information, please read the wikipedia article.
346966
Greetings,\n\nIt was probably Sirius the Dog Star.  One of the closer stars to us and when it twinkles it appears red, blue, green, and is really big for a star.\n\nIt was NOT a planet, as planets don't twinkle.  Jupiter is bright, but it's not very high up in the sky at 8:00 pm.  Venus is currently only up in the morning.  Saturn is a dim yellowish star in Gemini.  Mars is a dim orange star between Taurus and the Pleides.\n\nSo to sum up, it was most likely Sirius.\n\nYou can use the link provided for a interactive star chart that is easy to read and use.  Simply plug in your city and state and the time of day/night you want to see and most of the visible stars will show up along with the planets, comets, and a few other deep space objects.\n\n-matt
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That would be Halley's comet. I remember seeing it - very blurredly - in 1986.\n\nA bit of background info on the comet it's been known since at least 240 BC and possibly since 1059 BC. Its most famous appearance was in 1066 AD when it was seen right before the Battle of Hastings. It was named after Edmund Halley, who calculated its orbit. He determined that the comets seen in 1531 and 1607 were the same object that followed a 76-year orbit. Unfortunately, Halley died in 1742, never living to see his prediction come true when the comet returned on Christmas Eve 1758. \n\nHalley's Comet Statistics\nPerihelion distance: 0.587 AU \nOrbital eccentricity: 0.967 \nOrbital inclination: 162.24° \nOrbital period: 76.0 years \nNext perihelion: 2061 \nDiameter: 16 x 8 x 8 km
1063458
Shoemaker 1, tonight!\n\nVery comprehensive calender of comets below:\n\nhttp://www.aerith.net/comet/future-n.html\n\nBut for a simple answer, look at this website, it seems that today (7th June) we will see  the brilliantly named 102P/Shoemaker 1, which you can read about at the second of the two below links, and the third link is wikipedia's little info page on it (the important info is in the table at the right-hand side of the page)\n\nhttp://cometography.com/current_comets.html\nhttp://cometography.com/pcomets/102P.html\n\nSo get that telescope out! :-) Hope that helps
768063
North western sky.? In the USA.? Me and my work mate saw two bright lights in the western sky at 8pm off the coast of western australia. About 2 hours ago. They looked like fireballs and went horizontally then went out of sight. It lasted for about 20 seconds.
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Shoemaker-Levy 9. Hubble telescope took more pictures. Due to the gravity of Jupiter, the comet broke into several pieces and in July 1994 collided with Jupiter. The fragments speed was about 60 Km/s.
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I've not heard of this, but the biggest explosion since Big Bang? Sounds very exaggurated in my opinion. There was however an article about a large star exploding and turning into a black hole that was observed.\n\nThe last link I think talks about your event. The middle one is just interesting if you wonder about them in general.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991#Events
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The first impact occurred at 20:15 UTC on July 16, 1994, when fragment A of the nucleus slammed into Jupiter's southern hemisphere at a speed of about 60 km/s. Instruments on Galileo detected a fireball which reached a peak temperature of about 24,000 K, compared to the typical Jovian cloudtop temperature of about 130 K, before expanding and cooling rapidly to about 1500 K after 40 s. The plume from the fireball quickly reached a height of over 3,000 km [3]. A few minutes after the impact fireball was detected, Galileo measured renewed heating, probably due to ejected material falling back onto the planet. Earth-based observers detected the fireball rising over the limb of the planet shortly after the initial impact [4].\n\nAstronomers had expected to see the fireballs from the impacts, but did not have any idea in advance how visible the atmospheric effects of the impacts would be from Earth. Observers soon saw a huge dark spot after the first impact. The spot was visible even in very small telescopes, and was about 6,000 km (one Earth radius) across. This and subsequent dark spots were thought to have been caused by debris from the impacts, and were markedly asymmetric, forming crescent shapes in front of the direction of impact.\n\nOver the next 6 days, 21 discrete impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:34 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (750 times the world's nuclear arsenal). Two impacts 12 hours apart on July 19 created impact marks of similar size to that caused by fragment G, and impacts continued until July 22, when fragment W struck the planet.\n\n\nId imagine that a fair bit of the earth would of been wiped out given those figures
586293
Is there something significant we should know about the Winter Solstice date of December 21, 2012? Yes. On this day a rare astronomical and Mayan mythical event occurs. In astronomic terms, the Sun conjuncts the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic. The Milky Way, as most of us know, extends in a general north-south direction in the night sky. The plane of the ecliptic is the track the Sun, Moon, planets and stars appear to travel in the sky, from east to west. It intersects the Milky Way at a 60 degree angle near the constellation Sagittarius.\n\nThe cosmic cross formed by the intersecting Milky Way and plane of the ecliptic was called the Sacred Tree by the Maya. The trunk of the tree, the Axis Mundi, is the Milky Way, and the main branch intersecting the tree is the plane of the ecliptic. Mythically, at sunrise on December 21, 2012, the Sun - our Father - rises to conjoin the center of the Sacred Tree, the World Tree, the Tree of Life..\n\nThis rare astronomical event, foretold in the Mayan creation story of the Hero Twins, and calculated empirically by them, will happen for many of us in our lifetime. The Sun has not conjoined the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic since some 25,800 years ago, long before the Mayans arrived on the scene and long before their predecessors the Olmecs arrived\n\n\nIt will be the last date on this calendar. Check the foll link for more
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They realise they should have turned right at Warsaw.\n\nSeriously, it would result in enormous climate changes, tectonic plates could be affected resulting in earthquakes, harmful radiation from the sun could seep through - the Earths magnetic field behaves like a shield, hence the northern lights. \n\nPolarity changes have happened before on Earth and scientists believe we are overdue for another one.\n\nSo, something else to add to the list of 'Armageddons' we seem to have stacking up against us. No point worrying really, if one catastrophe doesn't get you, then another one will!
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Try the BBC website which has info about what meteor showers happen when. http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/solarsystem/meteors/index.shtml\n\nor the International Meteor Organisation\nhttp://www.imo.net/calendar/2007  - although it might be a bit too technical\n\nor Sky & Telescope magazine\nhttp://skytonight.com/observing/objects/meteors/3306006.html?page=1&c=y
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The Tunguska Event.\n\nA huge non-nuclear, sub atomic explosion in the skis over Siberia. \n\nThe theories around the cause of the explosion are varied;\n\nStray Anti-Matter particle.\nComet/ Meteor overheating and exploding on entry.\nSolar Particle disruption caused by mass sunspot activity.\nBy product of a Solar Mass Ejection event. \nA Primordial Black hole.\n\nOne theory I read stated that according to the "math" the instantaneous opening and collapse of a wormhole would release the same amount of energy.\n\nAny way, it happened in 1906, but a "rescue" mission wasn't sent for 10 years because at the time that part of Siberia was so remote they had to build railways roads and bridges to get there.
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Comet. Here's a picture of a big one near Earth:\nhttp://wsx.lanl.gov/WebPub/images/comet-hale-bopp_wurden-3-6-97.jpg\n\nNotice the two tails. The white tail is from ice becoming gas like a snowball in July. Comets are only really stable when they are in the outer reaches of the solar system. There is also a glowing blue tail that looks like it is some sort of Hollywood magic. This is the ion tain from the solar wind blowing across the comet and pulling along charged particles. Cool, huh?\n\nNo one really knows what the surface of a comet looks like because they are always boiling away and shrouding their cores when they are near Earth. Best guess is something like an enormous dirty snowball, only made with frozen CO2 and CH4 in addition to good old H20. It is very cold out where they are most of the time, so things that don't normally freeze turn into ices.
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Halley's comet with a period of approximately 76 years. The first comet for which a return was successfully predicted, it last appeared in 1986.
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It is about the historical significance of comets in proximity to catastrophes and the predictions made by people after seeing comets about the possible coming events.  \n\nBTW: It is a documnetary...