June 30 is National Meteor Day. I wonder if they celebrated something similar in the Late Cretaceous.

Some quick vocabulary:

• The meteor is the streak of light across the sky that one sees as an object burns up on entering the Earth's atmosphere; this is sometimes called a 'shooting star.' Lots of shooting stars constitute a meteor shower; Earth experiences a number of these per year (here's a handy list for meteor showers still to come in 2012);
• The meteoroid is the object that creates the meteor trail -- if the object burns up completely in the atmosphere;
• If some part of the object makes it to the surface, that is called a meteorite;
• The Late Cretaceous was punctuated by a rather large meteorite. The dinosaurs did not survive... except as birds. Some of those little rat-like mammals became, well, us.

Whether that amounted to an improvement is not for this blog to determine.

NASA tracks a lot of large objects that could become meteorites. (That link will take you to a table of recent and forthcoming 'close encounters.')

Of course, these are the ones the government knows about.

One hopes that, in this instance, anyway, the government is actually well-informed.

But enjoy National Meteor Day today.

If the dinosaurs had a similar observance, they probably enjoyed theirs, too. All except the last one....

From the webcomic Chuckle-A-Duck

But, remember, we don't need to colonize outer space until we resolve all of our problems here on Earth.

Right?

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Updated November 21, 2012 to include the webcomic. It just seemed to fit so well.