Meteor Crater, Arizona, USA

© Michele Falzone/Alamy

Meteor Crater, Arizona, USA

Today’s a special day for astronomy enthusiasts. It’s both Asteroid Day and Meteor Watch Day. To celebrate, we’re at the rim of a 560-foot deep crater with a 3,900-foot diameter, creatively called Meteor Crater. (Scientists call it Barringer Crater, for the name of the man who first theorised it was a meteorite-impact crater.) Some 50,000 years ago, parts of an asteroid fell to Earth here, in a location just east of Flagstaff, a city in the US state of Arizona. And today, we can see just how devastating the meteorite must have been to leave a basin so large.