rfmcdonald | [PHOTO] On the morning's meteor event in Chelyabinsk (Reply)

What Wikipedia calls the 2013 Russian meteor shower occurred at 9:20 in the morning, local time, in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk and points west.

The BBC reports.

A meteor crashing in Russia's Ural mountains has injured at least 500 people, as the shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings.

Most of those hurt suffered minor cuts and bruises but some received head injuries, Russian officials report.

A fireball was seen streaking through the clear morning sky above the city of Yekaterinburg, followed by loud bangs.

President Vladimir Putin said he thanked God no big fragments had fallen in populated areas.

A large meteor fragment landed in a lake near Chebarkul, a town in the neighbouring Chelyabinsk region.

Much of the impact was felt in the city of Chelyabinsk, some 200km (125 miles) south of Yekaterinburg.

"It was quite extraordinary," Chelyabinsk resident Polina Zolotarevskaya told BBC News. "We saw a very bright light and then there was a kind of a track, white and yellow in the sky."

"The explosion was so strong that some windows in our building and in the buildings that are across the road and in the city in general, the windows broke."

Livejournaler zyalt, Ilya Varlamov, has dozens of photos and videos of the event and its aftermath up at his blog. Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares some of these.

This dashboard video captures the fall of one of the meteors.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCawTYPtehk&w=560&h=315]

This video shows the after-effect of the sonic boom that broke windows throughout the city, in this case in a commercial district.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7mLUIDGqmw&w=560&h=315]