November 24th, 2006
catch a falling star
Last night, I just happened to be looking out a north-facing bedroom window when a bright “green thing” fell out of the sky at around 23:15 hrs. EST. I assume it was a meteor… or would that be meteorite? In any case, I made the little graphic to provide an approximate idea of what it looked like. There was a bright, whitish point of light leading a wavering, fuzzy green tail.
I see meteors fairly often here at the farm as we have a reasonably clear light of sight in most directions, especially in autumn and winter after the leaves are off the trees. Most are just pale points of light that blip across the sky or dive down toward the horizon and blink out in a moment. However, over the span of about thirty years, I’ve seen several like the one in the graphic — a couple that popped bright white flashes as they streaked down, and three that trailed blue to bluish-violet tails. One of the bluish ones may have been quite close as it actually appeared to leave a smoky trail behind.
We’ve seen one other “weird thing” here at the farm. It may have been about 4 winters ago. We were standing out in the yard at night listening for owls and coyotes. There was a sudden flash of light… actually, flash seems inadequate to describe it as it was more like a big blast of light that lit up the snow. It reminded me of when a large camera flash goes off as it was quick, but the brightness seemed to hang in the air for a long moment. At first I thought it possible that it might just have been some strange vision glitch, but Don saw it too. No explanation for that one as there were no vehicles passing by on the road that could have made a flash with their headlights, and the light seemed to be coming from above rather than from ground level.
Have any of you seen interesting flashes such as these?