Meteor Composites

These false-color composite images shows meteors streaking through the skies over NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., on the night of Jan. 3-4, 2012. These represent a combinination of Quadrantid and non-Quadrantid meteors.

The dotted arcs in the image represent star trails. In photography, star trails result when a time exposure is made of a star using a fixed camera, caused by the rotation of the earth while the camera’s shutter is held open.