Asteroids are lumps of rock ranging in size from one to hundreds of miles across and most of them are circling the sun in a ring between Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid belt. However some of them have orbits more like comets and cross the earth's orbit. These are the Apollo asteroids. Luckily most of them cross the earth's orbit when the earth is somewhere else, but occasionally one does hit the earth and the consequences can be dramatic. Such collisions were much more common in the early days of the solar system and an impression of their effect can be seen in the form of the vast craters frozen into the moon's surface. The corresponding giant craters left on earth have been eroded away by wind and rain. It may have been an Apollo asteroid which finished off the dinosaurs and many other species by throwing up a huge cloud of dust and turning day to night for months on end. The origin of these menacing cosmic wanderers is a matter of more than passing interest to us.
Meteorites are lumps of rock, iron or coal-like (carbonaceous) aggregates which crash to earth from the sky. They have been venerated throughout history. The Kaaba, the sacred black stone at Mecca, the center of Islam, is almost certainly a meteorite, and a similar stone was venerated by the Pawnee Indians of Nebraska. . .
The Pawnee Indians of Nebraska call Vega the Black Star which, as we will see below, is rather an appropriate name.
At northern latitudes Vega lies directly overhead in the evening hours of late July and August...
... While the other bright calibration stars behaved as predicted, Vega was much brighter than expected in the far infrared.
Taurus was one of the very earliest constellations to be recognized and was probably named as early as 4000 BC, when it marked the Spring Equinox and its meeting with the sun marked the beginning of the agricultural year. ...
Sancho Panza, faithful servant of Don Quixote, visited them on his aerial voyage on Clavileno Aligero as the Seven Little Nanny Goats. The Onemdaga Iroquois Indians of North East America see them as the Seven Dancing Children.
For the Pre-Columbians of Central America, especially the Maya and the Aztecs, the Pleiades was the most important constellation in the sky. Its midnight culmination every fifty-two years, when their sacred and secular calendars once again came into coincidence, was a moment of particular dread and the signal for the most horrific human sacrifices. The west face of the Pyramid of the Sun at the ancient site of Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, and the city streets, are oriented towards the setting of the Pleiades. The midnight culmination was also the traditional date of the fearsome Witches' Sabbath or Walpurgisnacht, still observed today as Halloween. The traditional date of the culmination, 1 November, has been kept, though the midnight culmination of the Pleiades now occurs on 21 November. It is strange that both European and Meso-American cultures should attach such importance to the night when the Pleiades reaches its highest altitude at midnight.