Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 08:32:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: David Porter <dlporter@crl.com>
To: exploratorium pinhole <pinhole@exploratorium.edu>
Subject: fireball or bollide?
Message-Id: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970913081146.27651A-100000@crl6.crl.com>
This past Wednesday, Sept. 10, I was out with fourty middle school kids
looking at the stars up at Camp Cazadero in Sonoma Co., CA. I had just
pulled their attention away from their star charts and red-filtered
flashlights and had them all look towards Polaris. This was tough for
them, because tree-tops covered one of the two pointers on the big
dipper. This difficulty became over shadowed when ALL of us saw a
fireball streak across the northern sky from the eastern horizen to the
western horizen! I had never seen one of these, before. It occured at
9:05 Pacific Time. It's radiant was in the North East below our field of
view, and it disappeared below the tree tops in the North West. The
fireball was visible to us over an arc of at LEAST 100 degrees.
Did anyone out there see/hear this? Our group was too noisy to have
heard the crack/hiss of a bollide if that's what it was. I'm assuming it
was a fireball and not a bollide, but I'd love some confirmation before
Monday if at all possible.
Thanks,
David Porter, Brandeis Hillel Day School, San Rafael