Shooting stars

[snotmonkey]

I was standind outside my house at about 1:30-2:00am having a fag and a chat with a mate when he saw a streak of light across the sky, a couple of minutes later we saw another one go in a different direction. then 5 minutes after that another in a different part of the sky and in another direction. would meteors, taurids, leonids be able to travel in different directions? if not any ideas what they were. i think i can rule out alien ships/invaders as i can account for time(no lost hours) and my bum doesnt hurt:-)

[Jara]

It was most likely space junk. There is so much space junk up there, ranging from paint specks to defunct satelites, that most modern space missions involve co-ordinating with the movements of 'detectable' space junk, to avoid collisions in orbit. Even so, the space shuttle re-aligns itself to put its underside and wings, or even tail section, in the way of extra-vehicular astronaughts to protect them from undetected debris. Whilst at least one of the falling stars you saw may have been a meteor, it was most likely a collection of space junk re-entering Earth's orbit. Unless debris from the tail of an asteroid was deflected either by another mass, or by some other form of shear forces, and then sucked back inward to the same rough point, then it is unlikely that the meteors came from the same source. Generally, all the meteors from something like the leonid showers would have roughly the same trajectory per 'shower'.

[BenDToy]

If this happened sometime last week then it was likely to be debris from the tail of a comet. Unfortunately I don't have the article any more, but there was a piece in one of the papers about it. The earth apparently passed through the debris in the early hours of one day last week.

[Hamish]

BenDtoy is right,m the leonids metor shower happend last week it was supposed to be quite spetacular, we had fog!! The direction of the metor is to do with how you look at it and your relative angle to the metors path. They wont all be going in exactly the same direction but should appear in a similar part of the sky (ie the east). Hope this helps

[Obo]

As with the answers above the Leonid (so named becase the seem to originate from the constellation Leo) metoer shower took place last week (was at it's peak on the evening of the 19th) The meteors are fragments of the comet Temple-Tuttle that drops debris as it orbits the Sun area and were supposed to be particularly bright this year... I was in bed so can't confirm this!

[quattro]

If you are lucky enough to have a clear sky with no moon lie on your back and look up to the sky and will be amazed at how much ' activity ' there is up there . Whether they are meteorites , satelites , UFO's or whatever its amazing ,it does help to be away from street lighting and I think the best times are in the summer months . I remember impressing a girl I walked home one night with my star spotting it was all going well till that fatefull line ,' I think I can see Uranus '