Quadrantids meteor shower peaks - briefly - tonight

Tonight is one of the odder meteor showers of the years. Why is it odd? Well for one, it's called the Quadrantids -- named after a constellation that got redefined years ago and no longer exists. For another, the parent object of the shower isn't a comet, it's an asteroid that used to be a comet. And third, the shower peaks very sharply, coming and going in only an hour or two! Here's the deal. First, meteor showers occur when the Earth plows through a trail of debris in space, usually left by a comet orbiting the Sun. The meteoroids -- the solid bits of material -- are usually very small, no bigger than a grain of sand. As they plow through our atmosphere at speeds of dozens of kilometers per second, they burn up, turning into meteors (if they hit the ground they're called meteorites, which is very rare). ...