How to make the sky fall: Part 1

Here is the final meteor page design I created yesterday. It is in today's York Daily Record.

Here is how I did it.
I first drew a meteoroid in Adobe Illustrator CS3 using the pen and pencil tool.

Then I imported the meteoroid into Adobe Photoshop as a smart object on its own layer.
Here is what the layers file looks like of the finished meteoroid.

Now, let's take a step back. I created the space background using the gradient tool and creating my own unique gradient, called atmosphere.

Then, I added stars using the brush tools from the brush palette. I have them highlighted. Notice the stars and space background are on their own separate layers.

After creating the background elements, I then imported the meteoroid onto its own layer.

Here comes the fun part, adding the fire streaks. To create them I used the pen tool and drew a water-drop-like shape. And then made the path into a selection and feathered it about 10 pixels. The selection was then filled with a yellow-orange gradient.

I then added a reddish glow to the tip of the meteoroid again making a shape using the pen tool. I turned the path into a selection and feathered it and filled the selection with a red color.

To create motion for the falling object, I made a copy of the original meteoroid and added a motion blur to it. I also lowered the opacity of the blurred meteoroid layer.

Again, this is a look at the finished art with added fire streaks. Theses extra streaks are copies of the original fire streak. They have been modified in size and shape using the free transform tool.