Meteor, a startup that provides a modern, open-source platform for software developers to build Web apps, just nabbed $11.2 million dollars in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The company's main product simplifies and modernizes the process of writing Web software. It assumes that clients, whether desktop Web browsers or smartphones, can efficiently run JavaScript code and talk to a variety of cloud services from the likes of Amazon and Facebook. "Hot" code updates can be pushed live right away, rather than waiting a day or a week for conventional deployment cycles.

Meteor is a software-development company developing software for software developers, in other words—exactly the kind of business that Andreessen Horowitz likes to back.

Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Netscape, likes to say that "software is eating the world"—so he's been backing companies like Meteor and GitHub that help that trend along.

Matrix Partners and a wide range of angel investors also invested in the round.

Meteor is run by Nick Martin and Geoff Schmidt, both cofounders of MixApp, along with David Greenspan, cofounder of AppJet.

"The Meteor framework solves all of these problems. Meteor makes real-time application development dramatically faster and more approachable," Andreessen Horowitz partner Peter Levine wrote in a blog post about the investment. “The result is real-time, cloud-based Web apps that are scalable, secure and distributed by design.

"We see this technology as fundamentally important to the future of the Web. Through this investment in Meteor, as well as our recent investment in GitHub, we at [Andreessen Horowitz] are excited to help developers build the next generation of applications."

The funding comes less than a month after Andreessen Horowitz invested a record setting $100 million in GitHub, another startup focused on providing programmers a place to keep codes along with providing a platform for working on open-source projects.

Meteor hopes to make money with an upcoming product named Galaxy, an environment that will let enterprises securely deploy Meteor code within private corporate networks.

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The annual Perseid meteor shower illuminated the sky this weekend with hundreds of shooting stars.  

The best meteor shower of the year occurs as "Earth passes through a stream of debris from comet Swift-Tuttle," says NASA.

This year's show, which peaked on the nights of Aug. 12 through Aug. 13, was particularly cool because Jupiter, Venus and the crescent Moon lined up in the middle of the display, forming a bright stripe in the sky.

In case you missed the big show (or maybe some clouds got in the way), we rounded up some beautiful pictures and video of the celestial event. 

Taken in eastern Michigan on the night of Aug. 11, 2012.

A beautiful viewing at 10,000 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

A seven-hour composite of the shower over the Snowy Range in Wyoming.

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A spectacular meteor wowed stargazers across the United Kingdom Friday (Sept. 21) when it flared up and shattered into pieces in a surprise display of celestial fireworks.

The fireball was spotted by observers across Scotland and northern England as well as Ireland Friday night, according to BBC News and other media reports. Many observers captured views of the meteor on camera, including skywatcher Stuart Pitkeathly.

"At first, I thought it was a helicopter search light rising above the trees on the horizon as I was looking out my window," Pitkeathly, who lives in the town of Dalbeattie in southwest Scotland, told SPACE.com in an email. "Then as it came closer there was a burst of blue-green light and this was all in a few seconds. It then appeared to have a smoke like tail billowing from the bright fireball."

Pitkeathly's video of the Sept. 21 meteor shows what appears to be a fireball created as a small space rock breaks apart in Earth's atmosphere. Pieces of the meteor can easily be seen separating from the main body in his view.

Friday's meteor led many witnesses to wonder if it was sparked by a man-made piece of space junk falling out of orbit. But some experts have conclusively tied the event to a naturally occurring space rock burning up in Earth's atmosphere.

Veteran satellite tracker Marco Langbroek, who runs the blog Sattrackcam Leiden in the Netherlands, wrote today (Sept. 24) that the fireball was definitely a meteor. Langbroek used sighting reports to determine the fireball's trajectory and studied videos posted by witnesses to determine how long it lasted.

"This quick back-of-the-envelope reconstruction therefore shows that this must have been a meteoric fireball, quite likely of asteroidal origin, and we definitely can exclude a satellite re-entry," Langbroek wrote in his latest blog post.

The Earth is often struck by tiny space rocks, which generate meteor light shows as they streak across the sky. Several times a year, the remains of comets or asteroids flare up in Earth's atmosphere to create dazzling meteor showers, such as the recent Perseid meteor shower in August.

Pitkeathly said he was surprised by the amount of public interest in Friday's meteor event after he uploaded the video to his YouTube website. 

"The interest for what was captured has been amazing, and thousands of people across the UK and Ireland were eye witnesses to this on what was a superbly clear night great for stargazing," he said.

A would-be meteor in space is called a meteoroid. Only when it flares up in the night sky does it become a meteor. Any remains of the object that reach the ground, meanwhile, are called meteorites.

Earlier this year, a rare daytime fireball surprised U.S. observers in California and Nevada when it unleashed a sonic boom that some mistook for a small earthquake. The meteor was caused by a minivan-size asteroid and created several meteorites that NASA retrieved in a follow-up search.

Editor's Note: If you snapped a photo of UK fireball on Friday, Sept. 21, and would like to share it — or any other night sky picture — with SPACE.com for a possible story or gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik and SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

• Surprise Meteor Lights Up U.K. Sky | Video
• Meteor Shower Mania: How Well Do You Know 'Shooting Stars'?
• Amazing Perseid Meteor Shower Photos of 2012

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Black glass from a Martian meteorite that crashed in Morocco last summer may shed light on not only the surface of the Red Planet but also its interior and atmosphere, a new study reveals.

Rocks are occasionally blasted off the surface of Mars by cosmic impacts from asteroids. These drift in space, with some crashing down on Earth. Martian rock known to be on Earth is very rare: only about 220 pounds (100 kilograms) worth.

Last July, a swarm of Martian meteorites plunged into the Moroccan desert. These rocks, named Tissint meteorites after the village they landed near, were the first batch of Martian meteorites to be collected right after observers witnessed their fall. All the other Martian meteorites, many of them recovered from Antarctica, had been gathered well after arrival, during which time degradation and contamination may have obscured secrets they held about Mars.

Within a Tissint meteorite, scientists found an abundance of black glass that they say may contain traces of Mars' surface, atmosphere and interior. This glass preserved key details about Mars. [Black Glass in New Martian Meteorite (Photos)] 

The black glass resulted from melting, probably caused by the impact that knocked the rock off Mars an estimated 700,000 years ago.

The meteorite is mostly a kind of volcanic rock known as basalt, rich with an olive-green crystal known as olivine. This suggests it once was part of Mars' interior. However, levels of sulfur, fluorine and trace elements such as cesium hint at material from the Martian surface. In addition, the glass contains bubbles of Martian atmosphere.

To explain the presence of the interior, surface and atmosphere of Mars in one meteorite, the researchers suggest the rock's cracks and fissures were infiltrated by fluids washing down from the Red Planet's surface.

"It was really surprising and very exciting to find the evidence of Martian surface alteration in Tissint," lead study author Hasnaa Chennaoui at Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco, told SPACE.com. "We didn't expect this result."

The meteorite possesses certain varieties (isotopes) of helium, neon and argon that were likely formed by collisions with the high-energy-charged particles of cosmic rays. The isotopes reveal the rock spent about 700,000 years in space. This makes the Tissint rocks roughly the same age as three-quarters of all known Martian meteorites, suggesting they all got knocked off Mars by the same event.

The scientists detailed their findings online today (Oct. 11) in the journal Science.

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• 7 Biggest Mysteries of Mars
• Fallen Stars: A Gallery of Famous Meteorites
• The Changing Face of Mars

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Loud booms and bright streaks of light surprised hundreds of folks in California's Bay Area Wednesday night, ABC News reports. 

No, this wasn't the result of a natural disaster. Earth is actually passing through a stream of debris and dust released by Halley's Comet, giving rise to the annual Orionid meteor shower.  

The best view of the shooting stars will be this weekend. Stargazers should expect to see about 20 or more meteors per hour. 

If you're stuck indoors, NASA will host a live feed of the meteor show starting Saturday at 11 p.m. EDT.  

If you catch any good photos from the light show that you'd like to share, shoot an email to dspector@businessinsider.com.  

SEE ALSO: Tour The Man-Made Crater That's Been Burning For 40 Years

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Set your alarm to go off early Sunday morning on the East Coast. That's when the Orionid meteor shower will put on its best display, the good folks at NASA say. 

The Orionid meteor shower occurs as Earth passes through a string of space debris, including dust, rock and ice, that comes from Halley's comet. 

This space dirt flies into our atmosphere, creating a dazzling light show in the sky as it burns up.

To make the most out of meter-watching experience, professor of astronomy at the University of Texas, Anita Cochran has answered our questions about the cosmic event.  

BI: What are meteors? 

AC: Meteors are particles of dust or rock passing through the Earth's atmosphere. The source can be either comets or asteroids and meteors can be seen at any time. However, there are many meteor streams which return at predictable times. These meteors come from comets.

Basically, as a comet orbits the Sun the nucleus gets heated and gas and dust flow outwards from the nucleus. The dust will flow behind the comet in a similar orbit. The dust that flows outwards can stay in orbit around the Sun in an orbit similar to the comet for hundreds of years. When the orbit of the dust intersects with Earth's orbit and the Earth is at the intersection point, the dust enters the Earth's atmosphere and the dust gets burned up. Essentially none of the material survives the entry to reach the group.

The Orionid meteor shower represents the intersection of the orbit of Comet Halley's debris with the Earth's atmosphere.

BI: How many meteor showers do we get each year?

AC: We typically get around 20 meteor showers a year. 

BI: How does this compare to the Perseid Meteor shower we saw in August?

AC: The Perseid shower tends to have more meteors per hour and the meteors are brighter. For the Orionids, we expect around 25 meteors an hour appearing to come from the constellation Orion (Hence the name — they enter the atmosphere from a direction on the sky toward Orion).

BI: What is special about the Orionid shower?

AC: Because comet Halley orbits the Sun in the opposite direction as the Earth, the Orionid meteors enter the atmosphere relatively fast. Thus, they are seen to "explode" (really fall apart) more often than other meteor showers.

BI: What's the best way to view the meteor shower?

AC: The best way to look is to find a dark sky and look after midnight. Face towards the constellation Orion. Get comfortable (a lounge chair you can lean back in is good). Do not use a telescope or binoculars as you don't need them and you could not see a wide enough piece of the sky with those tools.

AC: What an observer will see will be streaks of light appearing to originate near the constellation Orion. They will be different brightnesses and some might brighten near the end of their trail. They will be seen for seconds only.

If you snap any great pictures of the meteor shower, feel free to send them to dspector@businessinsider.com and we'll publish them here. 

SEE ALSO: Tour The Man-Made Crater That's Been Burning For More Than 40 Years

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The Orionid meteor shower peaked on the morning of Sunday, Oct. 21 this year.  

The meteors come from bits of debris left behind by Halley's Comet when it last visited Earth in 1986. When pieces of dust, rock and ice hit our atmosphere, they get burned up and create streaks of light in the sky. 

Take me to the pictures > 

"Because comet Halley orbits the Sun in the opposite direction as the Earth, the Orionid meteors enter the atmosphere relatively fast. Thus, they are seen to 'explode,' or really fall apart, more often than other meteor showers," Anita Cochran, a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas, tell us. 

In case you missed the light show, we've rounded some great pictures snapped by skywatchers. 

If you snapped any photos and would like to share them on Business Insider, send them to dspector@businessinsider.com with a name and location. 

Skywatcher Mike Lewinski snapped this photo on Oct. 20, 2012. "This bright meteor left a persistent ion train visible in subsequent frames for about half an hour," noted Lewinski.

An Orionid meteor, seen over Huntsville, Alabama.

An Orionid fireball meteor from North Georgia College. The photo was taken at 12:29 a.m. EDT on Oct. 21, 2012.

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Last week, an exploding fireball surprised hundreds of residents in California's Bay Area. 

On the same night, a very tiny piece of that fireball allegedly struck the roof of a woman's home in Novato, California, Henry K. Lee of SFGate reports.

The woman, 61-year-old Lisa Webber, heard the meteor hit her roof, and found the rock fragment in her yard three days later. She went searching for it because the local news was reporting that some debris may have been left behind from the earlier meteor shower.  

NASA has examined the space rock, which is about two inches, and confirms that is from the meteor that passed over the Bay Area Wednesday night.  

The streaking fireball was part of the annual Orionid meteor shower, which peaked Sunday Oct. 21, producing an average of 25 meteors per hour.  

SEE ALSO: Cool Pictures Of The Orionid Meteor Shower

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Everyone makes mistakes — even scientists. Earlier this week, a tiny piece of rock that struck a woman's home in California was thought to come from a meteor.

Turns out, the two-inch object was just a regular Earth rock, The San Francisco Chronicle's Henry K. Lee reports. 

Lisa Webber heard the object hit her roof during last week's Orionid meteor shower. She went searching for the rock fragment three days later because local news was reporting that some debris may have been left behind from the meteor shower.

Peter Jenniskens, a scientist at the SETI Institute, inspected the rock and swiftly announced that it was from a meteor. 

Jenniskens rescinded his original proclamation on Tuesday, admitting that the purported meteorite was just a natural rock from Earth.

What he thought was crust from the heat of entry was instead a result of weathering, the meteor expert explained. Case closed.  

SEE ALSO: Cool Pictures Of The Orionid Meteor Shower 

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It's that time of the year again! The annual Leonid meteor shower is set to peak on Saturday, Nov. 17 before dawn and again on Tuesday, Nov. 20. The dazzling display happens every year around mid-November as Earth passes through a stream of debris left behind by the comet Tempel-Tuttle. 

The shower gets its name because the meteors appear to come from the constellation Leo the Lion.  

Although a dark night sky means we should be able to see the meteors pretty clearly, this will be one of the tamer showers in terms of meteors per hour. We can expect to see 10 to 15 meteors per hour, according to Space.com's Joe Rao. 

The intensity of meteors has to do with how close comet Tempel-Tuttle gets to the sun, which heats the comet, forcing gas and dust to flow outward from the center. The last time Tempel-Tuttle made its closest approach to the sun was about 14 years ago, resulting in particularly strong showers (thousands of meteors per hour) between 1998 and 2002. 

Even still, we recommend setting your alarm clock early to view the stunning event. 

The meteors are usually bright and look white or bluish-white, though "some observers reported yellow-pink and copper-colored" meteors in recent years, according to Astronomy.com's Michael E. Bakich. 

The meteor shower follows a rare total solar eclipse, visible in person to a lucky few in Australia.  

SEE ALSO: NASA Expected To Unveil Mission Beyond The Moon > 

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The Geminid meteor shower will put on a good show all week, but is expected to peak on Thursday night, Dec. 13, NASA says. 

The Geminid meteor shower occurs as Earth passes through a string of space debris, including rock and ice, from an extinct comet called 3200 Phaethon. This happens every year in mid-December. 

This meteors fly into our atmosphere from the constellation Gemini, from which they get their name.

The Geminid meteor shower is generally known as the liveliest of the year, producing up to 120 meteors per hour, which "can be seen from almost any point on Earth,"according to NASA astronomer Bill Cooke.   

NASA will host a live Web cast of the shower starting on Dec. 13 from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m EST. 

SEE ALSO: Tour The Man-Made Crater That's Been Burning For More Than 40 Years

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The Geminid meteor shower, described by astronomers as the most intense meteor shower of the year, peaks tonight, Thursday, Dec. 13. 

NASA will host a live Web cast of the shower tonight, starting at 11 p.m. and running to 3 a.m EST. 

The Geminid meteor shower can produce up to 120 meteors per hour, which "can be seen from almost any point on Earth," according to NASA astronomer Bill Cooke.

That means all skygazers have to do is step outside late at night and choose a dark spot in the sky. It's a good idea to steer clear of street lights and other forms of glare. You don't need binoculars or any other equipment to view the streaming fireballs. Just look up.

"Under a clear, dark sky, you may see at least one Geminid per minute on average from roughly 10 p.m. Thursday until dawn Friday morning,"says Sky & Telescope's Alan MacRobert.

The Geminid meteor shower occurs as Earth passes through a string of space debris, including rock and ice, from an extinct comet called 3200 Phaethon. This happens every year in mid-December. 

These meteors fly into our atmosphere from the constellation Gemini, from which they get their name, and create a beautiful light show as they burn up.   

Editor's note: Snap any pictures of the meteor shower? Send them to dspector@businessinsider with a location and we'll publish them here. 

SEE ALSO: Tour The Man-Made Crater That's Been Burning For More Than 40 Years

SEE ALSO: 10 Times The World Was Supposed To End And Didn't

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The Geminid meteor shower lit up the sky Thursday night with hundreds of streaming fireballs.  

Cloudy skies and street lights notwithstanding, the most intense meteor of the shower of year could be seen from almost every point on Earth. 

In some parts of the world sky watchers braved chilly temperatures during the pre-dawn hours to capture the dazzling shooting stars on camera.  

There's another opportunity to view the meteor shower tonight, though it won't be as spectacular.  

In case you missed last night's display, we rounded up some beautiful pictures taken by amateur and professional photographers. 

Watching from San Francisco, Tony Eckersley saw around 30 meteors over a one-hour period. Eckersley snapped 90 photos and managed to capture 7 meteors, which are featured in this composite shot.

This picture, captured a 1 a.m. on Dec. 14 in Saukeville, Wisconsin, was posted by Twitter user Susan Kim.

At 2:20 a.m. on Dec. 14, Jason Pierce was lucky enough to catch three Geminids in less than a minute over New York City.

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Meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens must move quickly to trap evidence of a fresh meteorite fall.

In 2008, a small asteroid roughly three meters across struck Earth’s atmosphere over northern Sudan, producing a brilliant fireball in the sky.

The asteroid’s orbit had been tracked before striking Earth, upping the chances that searchers would be able to locate pieces of the meteorite on the ground.

So Jenniskens traveled to the Nubian Desert to recover fragments, as did dozens of searchers from the University of Khartoum.

In April of this year, he did not have to travel nearly so far to gather fresh meteoritic material.

A bright fireball lit up the daytime sky April 22 over northern California’s gold country, a few hours’ drive from Jenniskens’s bases of operations in the San Francisco Bay Area: the SETI Institute in Mountain View and the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field.

The California bolide, like its African predecessor, made a well-documented entry — three Doppler radar stations picked up the track of the fireball, pointing the way to meteorite fragments on the ground. (The asteroid itself had not been spotted in space — such small objects usually escape astronomers’ notice.)

Given the convenient location, the searchers were even able to marshal a slow-moving zeppelin to scan the area from the air, to look for impact scars on the terrain below caused by large meteorite fragments, but none were found.

Jenniskens and other searchers did ultimately locate 77 smaller pieces of the meteorite on the ground, according to a study he and his colleagues published in Science on December 21. The fragments total nearly one kilogram. But that is just a tiny fraction of the original mass of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite — named for the site of one of the finds, in Coloma, Calif. (Sutter’s Mill also happens to be the place where the California Gold Rush began in the mid-1800s.)

In the new study Jenniskens and his colleagues report that the asteroid that hit the atmosphere probably had a mass of some 40,000 kilograms, corresponding to a diameter of 2.5 to four meters. It streaked in from the east before detonating at an altitude of about 48 kilometers, releasing the energy equivalent of four kilotons of TNT in the process, or about one-quarter the yield of the nuclear weapon detonated over Hiroshima.

The impact was seen and heard by many witnesses and was even picked up by two infrasonic (low-frequency sound wave) detector stations designed to monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.

Given the violence of the reconstructed atmospheric entry, it’s remarkable that any fragments were recovered at all. Drawing on witnesses’ photos and videos of the fireball, the researchers have calculated that the parent object of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite entered the atmosphere at 28.6 kilometers per second (64,000 mph) — the highest such entry velocity recorded for recovered meteorites.

The recovered chunks revealed the Sutter’s Mill meteorite to be a rare variety called a carbonaceous chondrite. And in this case, rapid recovery proved critical — the researchers’ analysis found notable differences between samples recovered just two days after atmospheric entry and those found a few days later, after heavy rainfall.

The rainwater reacted with sulfurous compounds in the meteorite, partly overwriting its original chemical makeup. The rapid alteration of meteorites by terrestrial water, the researchers conclude, “probably erases many vestiges of the internal and external process on the asteroid” and may mean that carbonaceous asteroids are more complex in composition than had been thought.

SEE ALSO: Here Are The 5 Strangest Meteorites Up For Auction

SEE ALSO: The 'Meteorite' That Hit A Woman's Home Last Week Is Not A Meteorite

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On April 22 of this year, an exploding fireball woke up parts of California and northern Nevada.

To earthbound observers, the SUV-sized meteorite looked like a bright streak of green and white in the daytime sky, causing an intense boom as it burned up at a safe distance above Earth's surface.  

There were initially no reports of fragments from the meteorite reaching the ground. But scientists were able to track down pieces of the space rock two days later using data from Doppler radar at nearby weather stations as well as video and photographs of the fireball sent in by eyewitnesses.

The information led scientists to a place called Sutter's Mill, about 36 miles northeast of Sacramento, California, where some fragments of the original meteorite (later named Sutter's Mill meteorite) were found. (Coincidentally, Sutter's Mill is the site where gold was discovered in 1848, leading to the California gold rush). 

Meteor researcher Peter Jenniskens, of the SETI Institute, led the recovery effort and later analysis, which is all detailed in a study published yesterday, Dec. 21, in the journal Science.

The asteroid struck Earth's atmosphere at a record-breaking speed of 64,000 mph, or 17.8 miles a second, at which point the rock is referred to as a meteor. The meteor had a mass of about 88,000 pounds and broke up harmlessly at an altitude of about 30 miles, releasing the equivalent to four kilotons of TNT. A total of 77 meteorite fragments were found on the ground, adding up to less than 2 pounds of material.  

The Sutter's Mill meteorite is also a rare type of meteorite that belongs to "a primitive class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites, which contain some of the oldest material in the solar system,"according to a news statement. 

SEE ALSO: Our Favorite Shots From The Greatest Meteor Shower Of The Year

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Cold weather and a bright moon didn't stop skywatchers around the country from capturing stunning shots of the annual Quadrantid meteor shower this week.

Astrophotographer Victor Rogus, for example, snapped a dramatic image from Jadwin, Mo., a few hours before dawn today (Jan. 3) during the Quadrantids' peak. 

The streaking meteor seen in the photo appears in Ursa Minor, a constellation in the northern sky.

"Battling the cold and the gibbous moon was no easy task, but I managed to catch this meteor trail in a 12-second exposure with a Cannon 60Da astrophotography camera," Rogus told SPACE.com via email. 

"I was out all night. I made nearly 500 exposures to the northeast, but saw only two bright ones, and a few faint under mostly clear, and transparent skies," Rogus added. "Glad to be in out of the cold!" [Stargazer Photos: Quadrantid Meteor Shower of 2013]

Veteran meteor observer John Chumack of Dayton, Ohio, set up a network of cameras to record the Quadrantid meteor shower's peak. The result was an eye-popping video of Quadrantid meteors as they streaked overhead, as well as toward the north, west and east.

"Last night the Quadrantid meteors started slamming into the Earth's atmosphere" Chumack said in an email. "I captured 52 Quadrantid meteors ... but it's not over yet. Keep watching as sometime you can see a few meteors for several days after the shower peak, too!"

Skywatcher Scott Tully also braved the cold early this morning to come up with a nice Quadrantid shot.

"I was out photographing the meteors this morning in the Northwest Hills of Connecticut," Tully wrote SPACE.com.

"The meteor shower was beautiful against the moonlit sky, but with some clouds and the bright moonlight I was only able to spot a few bright streaks up until around 5:00 a.m. It was between the hours of 5 and 6 when the numbers started to pick up, and I caught this shot just before 6:00 a.m. EST."

On the outskirts of Tucson, Ariz., Sean Parker worked hard this morning to get a spectacular photo of Quadrantids streaking through the sky above a lot full of retired aircraft.

"The boneyard is run by the [Davis-Monthan] Air Force base which requires clearance, and is surrounded by 10-foot barbed wire fences,"

Parker wrote on his blog. "But fortunately I have a Jeep and a tall tripod — so I drove around numerous spots looking for a place I could pull my Jeep close to the fence and take pictures from on top. And I found one."

The Quadrantid meteor shower is a bright display seen mainly in the Northern Hemisphere around the beginning of the new year.

The meteors appear to originate where the constellations Hercules, Boötes, and Draco meet in the sky.

The Quadrantids result when Earth plows through streams of debris shed by the asteroid 2003 EH1, which may actually be a chunk of a long-dead comet.

Though the shower peaked overnight last night, it's still going on. NASA is providing a live webcast of the display through Friday (Jan. 4), which you can watch here on SPACE.com.

Editor's note: If you have an amazing photo of the Quadrantid meteor shower or any other night sky view that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, send images, comments (including name and location) to managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

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WATCH: 5 Ways The World Will End 
(according to the Mayan calendar and any other)

A meteor scientists believe weighed up to 11 tons streaked through the Russian dawn Friday morning at supersonic speeds. Reports of a 150 mile sonic boom were reported blowing out windows in cars, and houses with glass causing a number of injuries.

The Russian Academy of Sciences believes the meteor entered the earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk at speeds of up to 54,000 miles per hour, before shattering between 18 and 32 miles above the ground.

The Houston Chronicle has a report from Moscow:

"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people's houses to check if they were OK," said Sergey Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow, the biggest city in the affected region.

"We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud thundering sound," he told The Associated Press by telephone. Another Chelyabinsk resident, Valya Kazakov, said some elderly women in his neighborhood started crying out that the world was ending.

Some fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Cherbakul, the regional governor's office said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. It was not immediately clear if any people were struck by fragments. The agency also cited military spokesman Yarslavl Roshupkin as saying that a six-meter-wide (20-foot-wide) crater was found in the same area which could be the result of fragments striking the ground.

Despite assurances by NASA and other officials, The Voice of Russia reports that St. Petersburg astronomers believe this meteor is linked to today's approaching 2012DA14 asteroid.

Here's what the scene looks like in the aftermath:

The scene on the ground in the Urals after the #RussianMeteorite hit twitter.com/moonbird/statu…

— moonbird (@moonbird) February 15, 2013

RT.com reports:

Lifenews tabloid said that at least one piece of the fallen object caused damage on the ground in Chelyabinsk. According to preliminary reports, it crashed into a wall near a zinc factory, disrupting the city's Internet and mobile service.

Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it seemed like an earthquake and thunder had struck at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth.It made a bright streak through the sky and a huge boom when it exploded. Here's a stunning video of it shining bright as it falls through the atmosphere:

There's a ton more videos on YouTube. This compilation video is pretty great. 

Officials told Reuters that the object exploded at about 32,000 feet above the Earth.

The BadAstronomer, aka Phil Plait, warns that these things get faked all the time, but he seems convinced that this is for real. We agree, seeing so many different videos of the event that all look the same.

He says it's most likely unrelated to the asteroid DA14 that will pass by Earth tomorrow.

I don’t *think* this meteor is related to #2012DA14; a solid 12+ hours ahead; DA14 is still pretty far out. Coincidence?

— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) February 15, 2013

This video shows a shockwave about 20 seconds in, which Plait says is from the meteoroid hitting Earth's atmosphere, not the actual explosion:

NEIC shows no earthquakes in that area of Russia, so this did not hit the ground. #RussianMeteor

— Adam (@mycroft16) February 15, 2013

And one note for those perusing the YouTube videos. A video of a burning crater is making the rounds, but that's actually from the "Door To Hell" in Turkmenistan. Here's a whole gallery of images of the burning crater. It is totally unrelated to today's meteor.

It was right about the same time of day 105 years ago near the Tunguska River in Siberia when a 330 foot meteor seared through the sky and leveled 80 million trees over 800 square miles.

That asteroid was believed to have been 1,000 times more destructive than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

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A big meteor exploded over eastern Russia Friday morning. 

A video of the 11-ton meteor hitting Earth's atmosphere, illuminating the sky with a giant glowing orange ball, is pretty amazing. 

In the aftermath of the giant strike, a different video of a burning crater has also been making the rounds. Don't be fooled. This is actually from the "Door To Hell" in Turkmenistan.  

The burning crater is not related to the Russian meteor. It's been burning since 1971 when a Soviet drilling rig fell into an underground natural gas pocket. Geologists set the hole on fire hoping to burn off excess gas. The crater still burns today.  

Here's a whole gallery of images of the burning crater.

Check out the video below:

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The Russian city of Chelyabinsk was rocked today as it was hit by what appears to have been a meteorite weighing up to 11 tons.

At least 400 people have been reported injured, and the photos from the scene paint a crazy picture.

Given the abundance of mobile phones and dash-cams in Russia, the meteor and its aftermath is extremely well documented.

A huge streak could be seen across the sky on Friday morning.

This photo, taken with a mobile phone, gives a close up.

The city of Chelyabinsk is some 930 miles east of Moscow.

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Divers scoured the bottom of a Russian lake on Saturday for fragments of a meteorite that plunged to Earth in a blinding fireball whose shockwaves injured 1,200 people and damaged thousands of homes.

The 10-tonnes meteor streaked across the sky in the Urals region on Friday morning just as the world braced for a close encounter with a large asteroid that left some Russian officials calling for the creation of a global system of space object defence.

The unpredicted meteor strike brought traffic to a halt in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk as residents poured out on the streets to watch the light show before hovering for safety as a sonic boom shattered glass and set off car alarms. The shattered glass injured most of the people.

"We have a special team working... that is now assessing the seismic stability of buildings," Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov told residents as he inspected the damage in the central Russian city.

"We will be especially careful about switching the gas back on," he said in televised remarks.

A fragment of the meteor -- called a meteorite once it hits the ground -- was believed to have plunged into the Chelyabinsk region's frozen Lake Chebarkul.

"A group of six divers will inspect the waters for the presence of pieces of a meteorite," an emergencies ministry spokeswoman told Russian news agencies moments before the start of the operation.

But Puchkov stressed that no fragments had been discovered anywhere in the region so far despite some 20,000 rescuers and recovery workers being dispatched to the region on Friday.

The meteor explosion appears to be one of the most stunning cosmic events above Russia since the 1908 Tunguska Event in which a massive blast most scientists blame on an asteroid or a comet ripped through Siberia.

Scientists at the US space agency NASA estimated that the amount of energy released from impact with the atmosphere was about 30 times greater than the force of the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II.

"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office.

"When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones," he said in a statement published on the NASA website.

The drama in Russia developed just hours before an asteroid -- a space object similar to a tiny planet orbiting the sun -- whizzed safely past Earth at the unprecedented distance of 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers).

That put it closer to the ground then some distant satellites and sent off alarm bells ringing in some Russian circles about this being the time for joint global action on the space safety front.

"Instead of fighting on Earth, people should be creating a joint system of asteroid defence," the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee chief Alexei Pushkov wrote on his Twitter account late Friday.

"Instead of creating a (military) European space defence system, the United States should join us and China in creating the AADS -- the Anti-Asteroid Defence System," the close ally of President Vladimir Putin wrote.

The US space agency said the 2012 DA 14 asteroid's passing was "the closest-ever predicted approach to Earth for an object this large."

NASA estimates that a smallish asteroid such as the 2012 DA 14 flies close to Earth every 40 years on average while only hitting the planet once every 1,200 years.

Astronomers have detected some 9,500 celestial bodies of various sizes that pass near Earth.

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