[meteorite-list] Celestial Sleuths Track Historic Meteor Procession to South Atlantic

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:47:40 -0600
Message-ID: <5F488E520B8B47AF88B2D1246A27D103_at_ATARIENGINE2>

Anne and List,

A lengthy and detailed description of the event can
be found here (and downloaded as a PDF if desired):
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1956Metic...1..405M/0000405.000.html

A history of research into the path of the fireballs:
http://www.pa.msu.edu/people/smith/feb1913.pdf

Most of the detailed tracking and calculation of the
flight path described in this article is simply a repeat
of the work done by John O'Keefe sixty years ago.
Some references to O'Keefe's work can be found in
the wikipedia article on the "Fireball Procession":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_procession_of_February_9,_1913

I posted about it to the list on March 26, 2005:
http://www.mail-archive.com/meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com/msg32385.html

O'Keefe "conducted a search of 8,000 local newspapers
across the US and Canada for reports of such fireball
trains and plotted the results on the map. He discovered
that there TWO stripes of fireball trains, parallel to each
other but with the second one displaced to the south.
Whatever the decaying orbital object was, it [may have]
survived through TWO passes of the Earth's atmosphere."


Sterling K. Webb
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anne Black" <impactika at aol.com>
To: <baalke at zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>; <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 6:47 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Celestial Sleuths Track Historic Meteor
Procession to South Atlantic


> WOW!!!
> This should be mandatory reading for anyone who has ever thought that
> the meteor/fireball they saw landed just beyond those
> trees/houses/hills.......
> This one was seen from Canada to the South Atlantic!
>
>
> Anne M. Black
> www.IMPACTIKA.com
> IMPACTIKA at aol.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ron Baalke <baalke at zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>
> To: Meteorite Mailing List <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Wed, Jan 23, 2013 5:28 pm
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Celestial Sleuths Track Historic Meteor
> Procession to South Atlantic
>
>
>
> http://www.txstate.edu/news/news_releases/news_archive/2013/January-2013/Meteors012313.html
>
> Celestial sleuths track historic meteor procession to South Atlantic
> Posted by Jayme Blaschke
> Texas State University
> January 23, 2013
>
> A century ago, one of the most spectacular astronomical sights ever
> recorded lit up the skies when a grand procession of meteors blazed
> their way through the Earth's atmosphere. The event made headlines
> from
> Toronto to Pennsylvania and New York, and in the days that followed
> eyewitness reports poured in from as far away as Western Canada and
> Bermuda.
>
> Now, on the 100th anniversary of the historic event, astronomers Don
> Olson of Texas State University and Steve Hutcheon of the Astronomical
> Association of Queensland, Australia, have answered a long-forgotten
> call for more information from the pages of the science journal
> Nature, establishing a far greater range for the great fireball
> procession than previously known.
>
> Olson and Hutcheon publish their findings in the February 2013 issue
> of
> Sky & Telescope magazine, on newsstands now.
>
> A meteor procession occurs when an Earth-grazing meteor breaks up upon
> entering the atmosphere, creating multiple meteors traveling in nearly
> identical paths. Instead of plunging down through the atmosphere and
> burning up within a second or two, as often observed in normal meteor
> showers, the fireballs in meteor processions travel almost
> horizontally,
> nearly parallel to the Earth's surface. Each member of a meteor
> procession can remain visible to a single observer for about a minute,
> and the entire procession can take several minutes to pass by.
>
> On the evening of Feb. 9, 1913, the dazzling procession of meteors
> crossed over Canada and the Northeastern United States traveling
> northwest to southeast. University of Toronto astronomer Clarence A.
> Chant collected accounts from the astonished eyewitnesses and
> summarized, "To most observers the outstanding feature of the
> phenomenon
> was the slow, majestic motion of the bodies; and almost equally
> remarkable was the perfect formation which they retained." Hundreds of
> meteors were observed as far west as Saskatchewan, Canada, around 7
> p.m.
> Mountain Time, and as far east as Bermuda at around 10 p.m. Atlantic
> Time, a distance of more than 2,400 miles. In the years that followed,
> additional reports from a town in Alberta, Canada, and a ship off the
> coast of Brazil extended the confirmed range of the meteor procession
> to
> more than 6,000 miles.
>
> Writing about the procession in Nature in 1916, William F. Denning
> observed that "Such an extended trajectory is without parallel in this
> branch of astronomy. Further reports from navigators in the South
> Atlantic Ocean might show that the observed flight was even greater."
> Later in 1916 Denning observed in the Journal of the Royal
> Astronomical
> Society of Canada that, according to the most distant ship sighting
> known to him, the meteors "were still going strongly - and may have
> pursued their luminous career far southwards over the South Atlantic
> Ocean, but navigators alone, during morning watches, can give us
> further
> information on the subject."
>
> Olson and Hutcheon responded to the call for observations nearly a
> century later. Sifting through a vast array of archival material, the
> team discovered seven ship reports, all previously unknown, extending
> the established track of the procession by an additional thousand
> miles.
>
> "We had the most wonderful help from U.K. and German archives. By the
> time they were finished, the German archivists had found six reports
> and
> the U.K. archivists had located one more," Olson said. "We have seven
> new accounts from ships' meteorological log books that extend the
> track
> farther than ever before. This is the most complete map for this
> phenomenon that's ever been compiled.
>
> "The track now goes more than 7,000 miles--that's more than a quarter
> of
> the way around the world," he said. "That's an almost unbelievable
> meteor event!"
>
> The search was complicated by several factors. One was that by the
> time
> the meteors crossed all the time zones from Western Canada to reach
> the
> ships in the South Atlantic, it was after midnight and therefore the
> relevant local date was Feb. 10. Additionally, the Earth continued to
> rotate beneath the meteor procession, effectively moving the track
> farther west than expected if it were a simple great circle arc. But
> after an extended search, the seven ships in the South Atlantic off
> the
> Brazilian coast turned up to provide valuable data reporting the
> event.
>
> "This is the most complete map ever drawn of the ground track of the
> procession. The known ground track is now more than 7,000 miles long,"
> Olson said. "The seven ship accounts are all newly-discovered for this
> article. The archivists helped us to find new information about one of
> the greatest meteor events."
>
> Unfortunately, the ultimate fate of the spectacular meteor procession
> will likely never be known.
>
> "They disappeared into the really obscure South Atlantic, outside of
> the
> well-traveled shipping lanes," Olson said. "We would like to locate
> more
> reports, but we've had no luck so far finding accounts from Brazil,
> islands in the South Atlantic, South Africa and Australia. But the
> procession was still going strong when seen by the last ship."
>
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Received on Wed 23 Jan 2013 11:47:40 PM PST