comets and meteors

The spacecraft Giotto visited Halley's comet in 1986 and took pictures of its rocky core (below) and tail of icy dust. Halley's comet returns again in 2061; put it in your diary!

The SOHO spacecraft has seen hundreds of comets. To find out more about the SOHO comets, have a look in our Solar Storms section.

Meteors (or shooting stars) happen when tiny bits of debris from space burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. On any dark night you will be able to see a few meteors every hour. On some occasions though a 'meteor shower' happens. This occurs when the Earth passes through a particularly dirty part of its orbit. The Leonid meteor shower (so-called because the meteors appear from the constellation of Leo) takes place every November when the Earth passes through the dusty remnants of Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Tiny fragments, no bigger than grains of sand, burn up in the atmosphere to produce fleeting streaks of light, or "shooting stars".

This is a four-hour, all-sky photograph taken at Astronomical Observatory Modra in Slovakia on the morning of the 1998 Leonid maximum. The original image showed 156 meteors as well as the background stars in the Milky Way.

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