A True Higher Education

There's been an amazing side-effect from all this recent meteor activity- people are actually starting to pay a little attention to the real world around them. When I started going to livemeteors.com recently and seeing all of these monster meteors coming in, which was about five weeks ago now, at any given time there might be 5-6 people on the site, and now it usually averages over fifty and sometimes over a hundred. I'm pleased to see that.
 Except for a few of the usual trolls and general assholes, all of the legit folks I've chatted with are really cool. I've met people from Namibia, Ireland, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Canada and all over the place. Everyone has something in common, and that's an appreciation for shooting stars and other sky phenomena. I've been into shooting stars since I was a tot, and to finally meet a bunch of like-minded individuals is wonderful. Even better are the people who are new to the whole thing, and genuinely curious. As we speak I'm answering questions from a newbie. Also as we speak the meteors continue to roll in like Flynn. We're at around forty days at least of constant meteors. Based on the rate of meteors coming in, every single day has qualified as a strong meteor shower. This image is one of the Taurids from late May and early June. I saw one of these but it wasn't a fireball. It was very brief but intensely bright, and it matched up with images of other Taurids. I also got to see one from the tail of Halley's Comet.
 I always say heads up and I mean it. Of course no one much cares what anyone else has to say these days, and especially what I have to say, but people are hearing about all this and trying to find out what the story is for themselves, and that's what continuing education is all about. I hope I don't sound so gloom-and-doom as opposed to completely floored by all this activity, and as far as the danger level is concerned, to be honest it's higher than usual and some of these recent meteors are hitting Earth, but the vast majority are burning up spectacularly in the atmosphere. As I said people are seeing these beasts in broad daylight. One was just seen in these parts day before yesterday I think. It crossed Georgia and one other state at least. There's too many right now to keep track of.
 At least a few people are paying attention to something besides their phones and their dicks. Stuff like this matters. Pokemon Go doesn't. I can't say skywatching isn't without its own dangers too, because when I walk at night I'm constantly looking up, and I've blundered right into mailboxes. Fucking oops. That shit hurts, but it's not quite as bad as walking into traffic or off a cliff like those fools. Not surprisingly they say that this current generation is by far the most disconnected in history both to the world around them and socially, although most of them think otherwise. I think they're also the least prepared, and they don't know how to do that much or even think for themselves. The good news is that a few of these young people are looking past their phones. Judging by all the textspeak and emojis and lingo it's obvious they're kids, but at least a few of them are trying to learn something new (and real). Good for them.
 There's a classic story about some military leader who was selecting men for his army. He led a group of hot, thirsty men to a clear stream and observed them drinking. The ones who leaned their heads down and splashed their faces and paid no attention to anything but the water were disregarded. The ones who scooped up water to their mouths but remained observant of course were chosen. Same goes for today.
 As I write this the meteors are doing their usual daily ramp-up and they're going up sharply. A return just came in that lasted about three minutes. That's completely unreal. Some of the people who are saying that not all of these returns are meteors may have a point; especially in regard to the energy waves, but I still say that these are objects that have been dislodged from the Kuiper Belt. This is truly some shit going on right now. This hasn't happened in my lifetime. I can't help but take notice. I just saw something funny. I've been joking that I have Chicken Little on speed dial, and there's a guy who comes on the meteor site and his handle is ChickenLittleSaidSo. I love it. Suckers are flying in right now. I ain't nev. This is a heads-up.

Energy Waves

The latest thing in the sky show saga are these "energy waves" coming in. They came in for the first time yesterday, as noted by MrMBB333 (MrMB3 for short) on Youtube. They're hard to see in this image, but they're peaking out the entire system. If you look toward the bottom of the line second from the right, you can see the blank spot where the system has redlined. Speaking of those lines to the right, they're unusual in themselves. They apparently indicate a return from something other than meteors. They even make a different sound. Instead of one of two high tones, they make a dark, buzzing sound. Most curious.
 Yesterday these waves were also showing up on other charts that show things like photon count and whatnot. They were matched by the time stamps. I'm sure it will be the same situation today. I'll keep talking about this stuff as long as new information keeps pouring in. This is something new. Stay tuned. Heads up. Have a nice day.

Atmospheric Disturbance

Livemeteors.com has been going crazy all day. Forget three-minute meteors...we've been seeing steady streams lasting much longer. At least three of the main guys (who are into this stuff) put out videos about it today, including a live feed this morning. More and more people are picking up on this because of those vids, and where there were maybe 7-8 people visiting the site on any given day a month ago, now there's over a hundred sometimes. It's great people are starting to pay attention. I'm chatting with some of them now. Meteor people are very nice.
 Some of these guys are saying that these returns aren't meteors at all. I don't know what to think, but I know some of them are. Just this morning they had the biggest fireball on record in England. Something is up. I haven't had to call Chicken Little yet but I still have him on speed dial. Heads up!

Here's a link to one of MrMBB333's videos from this morning. It's amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqyqsez6ti0

UPDATE: Another great vid from MrMBB333: watch?v=u0C_KPFHk7E

March of the Meteors

Meteors are still pouring in at rates of between about 100 and 130 an hour, and there's no current meteor shower; minor, major or medium that they can say is responsible for these. I've been saying for over a month that I realize most people couldn't care less, but for someone like me or some of these people who've been into this stuff all our lives, this is definitey beyond shocking. I knew some of these things are massive; not to mention now up to three minutes in duration. I can't believe I'm typing this. A few days ago NASA issued an asteroid warning saying that there are large asteroid fragments within this debris field we're currently passing through. True to form a couple of days later an asteroid bigger than three football fields make a very close flyby. NASA's on it.
 This image is from meteorscan.com. I said it was in Canada but it's actually in the UK. My apologies to Canadian and British sky watchers everywhere. This site represents meteors differently obviously. It doesn't run continually like livemeteors.com. It refreshes every 45 seconds or so. It would be nice to see this run continually because you could see them appear and grow and then fade out. It's still a very cool graph though. It's colorful. It reminds me of those Magic Crystals.

This is an interesting image. The meteor on the right is coming in in a different frequency. I don't know if that means that it has a different type of composition than the others or what, but normally they all come in in one specific band. I've been seeing the same thing on the other site.

Here's another image of the same thing. This one was huge.

This one was nearly off the graph.

It's been surreal seeing basically a solid meteor shower for over a month now and to see these beasts keep rolling in. Outside or the freak out factor I've really enjoyed the visual representations. I love anything having to do with graphics, and these are good ones. I'd really like to have a few of these hanging on the wall as I said, and if I can get some high-quality images I'm going to do that. I think it's art. A little Armageddonish maybe, but art. Cosmic art. That's better. If you were tripping balls and looking at these images, I could see it turning into something like a deleted clip from Fantasia - The March of the Demented Candy Corns. Yeah. Ha ha. Heads up.

All Bets are Off

This is the middle of a three-minute meteor that came in yesterday. I didn't catch this one. One of the main Youtube guys caught it. I knew it was just a matter of time before they'd catch a huge one and I'd have to give up my crown as Meteor Guy, but I broke some ground and I got to see one of these snail meteors in person.
 I realize no one reads my blogs any more, but if, say, half a dozen people did, right now they'd be going "Hey, man...can't you leave the meteor shit alone?" In fact those are the very people who should be paying attention. It's not about fear or anything like that. It's about Hey man, there's more going on out there than you can see on your smartphone screen. We're all a part of something bigger than our Facebook status and all that shit; shit that in reality makes us LESS connected, at least in ways that are real and that really matter, than more. I love my devices too. Maybe I just want to keep one foot in the analog world. It's much richer. A friend in the hand is worth two on the 'Book. Not to mention a three-minute meteor.
 It's hard to get thoughts together about what to say about a three-minute meteor. I'll come back to it. Right now I have the meteor site on the taskbar as usual, and meteors are just pouring in at a steady clip that qualifies as a strong meteor shower, except that there's not a scheduled one going on. Of course they had to scramble to come up with some bullshit to explain this sky show that's been going on steadily for over a month. I think they're saying these are the Arietid meteors, and indeed they are coming from the constellation Aries, but according to the schedule the Arietids peaked on the 7th. You might see a few stragglers in the nights after a peak, but never, ever anything like this. Plus I looked on all the main sites and the Arietids wasn't listed on a single chart. I copy/pasted the lists. It's been putting out over 150 meteors per hour, and supposedly it takes place every year. No fucking way. If you want to tell me seriously that in half a century of meteor-watching I'd have missed something like that, well...I guess you can, but you'd be wrong.
 At least some sites are honest and they say they have no idea where these are coming from. Even the NASA site starts off that way, but in the next paragraph all of the sudden they change gears and say "Thee are from the Arietids." Okay, but how did it get from "We don't know" to "We do know?" It's right there on the site. It's nothing but more confusion. Most people, if confused, would rather just give up and say "It is what it is" that try to get to the bottom of it for even one second. It's far too taxing to their brains. It's easier just to let someone else do the thinking for them. If this sounds crazy...GOOD! Just do me one favor please. If you're going to call someone crazy, at least give them a fair trial. Is their view automatically bullshit just because it differs from yours? Your opinions aren't always right. Neither are mine. Neither are anyone's. That's what respect is about. Try to prove them wrong before you disagree out of hand just because something doesn't fit into your little box. There's a hell of a lot of territory outside your little box. You really might be surprised. More importantly you might learn something. What I'm saying is true.
 In any case a three-minute meteor changes the game. Actually the ones that started coming in last year that lasted ten, fifteen, thirty seconds and finally up to the single one last year that lasted two minutes were game-changers, but a three-minute meteor isn't normal. Most meteors hit the atmosphere hauling ass and they burn up in seconds if that. We've seen those. Maybe we've gotten lucky and seen a really big one that lasted five seconds. In years past that was a cosmic light show. I haven't seen one yet, but compared to the images in my mind of some of the really big ones I've seen that made me gasp, the idea of seeing one that lasts three minutes is hard to imagine. I'm looking.
 We're passing through a random debris trail like they've been saying since late last year. That's all there is to it. I've been watching meteors come in every day for the last five weeks at least. Now I'm only paying attention to meteors that last over a minute. A year ago I'd have laughed at that notion. Where are these bitches coming from? First off they said it was the Lyrids. Okay. I know that except for breaks of a few days in between there's some meteor shower going on all year long, but in the past they've usually been very minor events. Occasionally I've seen some good ones, but every year it's typically the Leonids and the Perseids that are the main showers, and it goes down in intensity sharply from there. One thing I like about livemeteors is that if I do know that one of these minor showers is coming up I can go to the site and see if it's a good one, and then maybe I'll go out and try to see some.
 So I went "Okay, the Lyrids. Don't keep up with those, but maybe they were just gnarly this year." Okay. Then we passed through the tail of Halley's Comet. Fair enough. Next up was one of the minor showers. This year it was massive. How about that. Two unheard-of huge ones in a row. Okay...odd are against it, but okay. Not to mention Halley's sandwiched in between, but shit happens. Now we just had the Arietids, which turned out to be the third usually-pissant-but-now-massive showers. Odds are highly against that, but okay. Then here comes a three-minute meteor. WTF? New one on me, bro. You can't write that off. BTW the guy who put up this video, one MrMBB333, who has an excellent and highly-informative channel, said that this one basically shut down the Canadian site for several minutes. It's not designed to handle meteors of that intensity. Livemeteors does a better job but they've been completely pegged a few times over the last few days. If this were to keep up for any length of time both sites would have to completely retool their systems and add more headroom to the graphs just to be able to record the data.
 If you've made it this far, congratulations. Next cup of coffee's on me. I think I know what the deal is on three-minute meteors. IN MY OPINION, there are only two things that could cause this. No...three actually, but I'm not going to pursue that choice at the moment. That would be that these are something other than meteors. One main guy flatly stated it. Some say it's Saucers. I say if it's Saucers, they're not having a very good time. Whatever these things are...meteors...asteroids...space junk...Interstellar flying pigs...Luke Skywalker...Arietids or whatever, they're blowing up. That can't be much fun. No, I'm going under the assumption that they're meteors. I love crazy shit, but three-minute meteors (3MM from here on out) are plenty crazy enough. It's every bit as crazy as UFOs to me.
 A meteor could only go so incredibly slowly if it were either huge, or just moving slowly to begin with. I think it's a bit of both, but mostly the latter. They're definitely much larger than normal, but if they were so huge that they survived the atmosphere they'd be hitting Earth all day long. Some of them are making landfall, including one day before yesterday in India maybe, and a massive one that hit Australia completely without warning a few months ago. Meteorites hit the Earth all the time, but the frequency is definitely going way up. It's on record. If these were all simply too massive to burn up in the atmosphere we'd know about it. The other choice is that they're moving much more slowly to begin with. That's the simplest explanation, and that's usually the best.
 Meteors usually hit the atmosphere at around 80,000MPH. That's quick. The slowest ones never go below about 55K. These obviously are much, much slower. The difference in speed between every single meteor I've ever seen and the one I saw two nights ago and the one last year would be very hard to even estimate. It's the hare and the tortoise. Your brain doesn't want to accept it as a meteor for the difference in speed alone. I hope someone will be able to calculate the speed of some of these creeping monsters. My best guess would be that they're easily 500-1,000 times slower than normal. How could a meteor violate its own specs and still be a meteor? I think it's because these meteors originate a lot closer to home.
 The Kuiper Belt sits about three planets away. It's a ring of debris that most people think was once a planet that was hit by another body. Objects range from the size of dust up to the size of small moons. In fact many people think Pluto was snagged from the Kuiper Belt by gravity. Meteors that hit our atmosphere every day presumably have been travelling for millions of miles and maybe millions of years or more. Some of them have been slingshotted along the way by the gravity of various bodies, and are going much faster than average, but the point is meteors usually go very fast. These don't. Something must be knocking objects loose from the Kuiper Belt. If something hit the Belt it would be like a break in pool. Objects would go out ahead of the impact in all directions in roughly a 160-degree arc, and some would head our way. They're not the same objects that have been sailing through space at insane speeds forever. They're from close by. They've been orbiting the Sun at a relatively slow pace so they aren't going anywhere near 80,000MPH to begin with. They're sped up by the impact, but they don't instantly start going 80K. They're going fast enough to burn up in the atmosphere, but they've come from close by and haven't even begun to build up speed by the time they get here. Momentum is conserved, so they're slow at first, and it might take another million years for them to get up to speed.
 These objects are our neighbors to begin with. During this long post (sorry) I've heard two reports so far of people seeing these meteors this morning in broad daylight. They say they're spectacular. I guess so. It's cloudy here now or I'd have a crick in my neck instead of blogging. If these meteors carried luggage, it'd have stickers that said GREETINGS from the KUIPER BELT. I'd bet my kit on it. Heads up. Might see one. Have a nice day!

Comment of the Day

This gargantuan mondo meteor came in this afternoon on livemeteors.com. I happened to catch it and I posted it to Youtube. Later I was back on the site in the chat room and I commented about the one I'd seen. One guy hopped over to my channel and saw the video. He freaked out. Like me he's never seen anything like it. So far it's apparently the biggest one anybody has caught on vid, and quite possibly it may be the biggest one yet. A guy with a channel called My sky's 5-D Mike saw my video and commented in the chat room. He said "Hey everybody go to Kelly's channel and see the big one he captured great work Kelly!" Thanks, Mike. That's cool. I've never had a comment on Youtube. Of course I've never had any vids on Youtube. Glad to know my work isn't all for naught. This is nuts. Heads up. I'm not kidding.

link to the beast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUUrqHaZIM8&feature=youtu.be

Rocket Ships

Except for the last month or so, if you hop over to livemeteors.com on any given day, this is typically what you'll see. This chart represents two smallish, short-duration meteors coming in. Occasionally you'll see a bigger, more colorful dot, or one that stretches into a line that indicates duration, and then some days you might have to wait a while to see anything at all. That's why these latest graphs have been so mind-blowing to me and other people who happen to keep up with these things.
 From a strictly aesthetical point of view, these images are beautiful. It looks like some graphic-design project. It's like some game designer trying to emulate some of the old 8-bit video games, and he's trying out different designs for space ships. Some of the other images remind me of koi in a koi pond; cartoon laser beams; looking at ornate chandeliers when you're tripping balls, and a whole bunch of cool rockets. This stuff is art. I'd hang it on a wall or put it on a t-shirt. Here's a few of the "rocket ships." Enjoy the tour of the outer space art gallery. No charge. Support the arts.

Still More Meteors

I'll quit talking about this just as soon as it stops. Just as there's a bit of a lull in the activity, one of these beasts comes in. This one clocked in at about 1:55. Here it is starting out at around 11:54:15.

Still going strong at 11:54:55.

11:55:23

It finally winks out at 11:56:10...almost two minutes long. This is gonzo stuff. I'm talking to a guy right now in the chat room. He's educating me on things like millibars in space, speed of meteor travel and such...things I don't know much about. He says that right now there's "horrible" amounts of energy being released. I do know enough to agree with that. Now he's comparing these meteors to Tunguska. My, my. This is some shit. This is Star Wars shit.

Meteor Mystery

I love a mystery. We got one. Right now meteors are pouring in, and no one is sure where they're coming from. It's literally a straight line right now, as the ionized tail of the meteorites is tracked and recorded. It's unreal. Stardust is falling. It would be a great time to do the thing I mentioned a while back, where you lay out a big sheet on the ground overnight, and whatever sticks to a magnet next morning is either meteorite dust or iron oxide dust from an incoming planetary system. Either way you can sell it on Ebay.
 I've mentioned livemeteors.com a million times, but the way it works, besides the visual representation you see here, is it emits a shrill tone every time it detects a meteor. Actually for some reason there are two tones; maybe about a minor second apart. Maybe a stone meteorite causes one tone and metal ones another, but I don't know how that works. Alls I know is I've been hearing those tones so much the last three weeks that I hear them in my head. I should probably figure out the interval on a keyboard just for curiosity's sake, but it doesn't matter. In any case they're coming in so steadily that the two tones are making a constant chord. It's obnoxious unless it's turned way down. I keep it running quietly on the taskbar, and when the tone gets really loud and long I'll click over and check it out. It's nuts. It does make pretty patterns on the screen.
 They've been saying since last year that Earth is passing through a debris field, and it would seem to be true. Space is a big place. They were always running into crazy shit out there on Star Trek, and while what we're seeing on livemeteors probably isn't the Megalons' doing, it's definitely a debris field, and it's thick as molasses. Out of all the videos I've seen, only one has named the source of this current round of meteors. All but one have said it's an unknown debris field, but one guy matter-of-factly stated that these were from the Aquarid meteor shower. The Aquarids do happen at this time every year but they peaked way back on the 6th. What's odd about that video is that the guy was talking about the Aquarids peaking on Friday night, which was almost three weeks after the actual peak, and not only that but the video came out Saturday morning. Why would he put out a video, which was incorrect to begin with, after the fact? I've almost quit questioning things any more. Gotta let a bullshitter be a bullshitter I guess.
 Shooting stars are in my Top-5 favorite things in the world, obviously. I've seen hundreds if not into a thousand or two easily by now, and I still want to see more. Every clear night I walk I lean my head back in an unnatural position to look up, and I try not to walk straight into mailboxes. This latest mystery has been going on a while. About three weeks ago we had the Lyrid shower, and right after that peaked they said we were going through the tail of Halley's Comet. The Leonids and the Perseids are usually the main showers every year, but with breaks of maybe a week in between, there's always some shower going on all year long. In all the years I've been on this site I've never seen such constant meteor activity as I'm seeing this very second, and according to the charts there's nothing going on meteor-wise.
 The only piece of this latest puzzle that's missing for me is that I've yet to see a two-minute meteor. In January of 2016 I saw a huge green fireball that went nearly across the entire sky, but it didn't last but about six seconds or so. Then last Summer Sally and I saw an incredibly slow-moving meteor; at least I think that's what it was, that lasted at least fifteen seconds. So far that's the craziest thing I've ever seen relating to meteors, and I'm really glad there was another witness. That was incredible. Still it's a long way away from a two-minute meteor. There's probably a dozen videos about this very topic right now, and after people click on this site and see all this, there will probably be a dozen more.

This one just now came in, and it's just a little one as of late. A year ago this one would've freaked me out. Actually, a month ago it would've. As of the last three weeks this is nothing. I'm already jaded? That's amazing in itself. Right now I'm having to keep the volume on livemeteors as low as I possibly can, because it's now almost a constant, dissonant, two-note chord. I think it's safe to say that the sky is saturated with meteors right now. I've never seen anything like it, and I'm definitely not alone. Stay tuned. Heads-up.

BREAKING NEWS

This gargantuan meteor just came in. I keep thinking I've seen it all and then something like this happens. I keep talking about these meteors because when you've been so utterly familiar all your life with something, like shooting stars have been to me since age four, when it changes so much it's a paradigm shift. And I'm not the only one concerned. When this monster hit I made a comment in the live chat. Three guys joined in, and one seemed to be an expert of some sort. Both said what I've been saying and that's that these meteors are different from any they've ever seen.
 One guy put it up on his Youtube channel immediately. I'll put a link below. Those guys are freaking out too. It's not just me. Stay tuned. Heads up.

Here's a link to a video of this image I took of the huge meteor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUK7ECD0ETo