http://www.wtopnews.com/?sid=25146&nid=25
Bolide Lights Up Morning Sky WTOP December 2, 2002 WASHINGTON - The bright light many people saw streaking across the sky early morning Monday was a bolide or fireball, said Geoff Chester, a spokesman at the U.S. Naval Observatory. "This is basically a large meteor. We're talking about a rock here that's on the order of size of a suitcase or something like that. It's been orbiting the sun for billions of years," Chester said. "In reality, this object is entering the Earth's atmosphere. At an altitude of between 80 to 100 miles or so it is vaporizing and leaving a very bright trail of light behind it," Chester said. "In a way it's kind of similar to the Leonid meteors that we just had a couple of weeks ago. Instead of being a little bit of fluff that sputtered off a comet that we run into every year, this is just a random, fairly large rock that runs into the Earth's atmosphere," he said. WTOP callers in Virginia and Maryland reported seeing the natural phenomenon between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. Callers described it as a very big ball of blue-ish green with a tail 300 to 400 yards long. "It was absolutely beautiful. It looked like it was going to hit the ground," said one listener who called from Culpeper County, Va. She described it as a lot longer than the meteors seen during the recent Leonid meteor showers. One Waldorf, Md., caller said when people saw it, they started pulling off the road. Chester said the last time a bolide was seen was on July 23, 2001, between 6 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. People reported seeing it from New York to Virginia. ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
