Meteor procession

A meteor procession occurs when an Earth-grazing meteor breaks apart, and the fragments travel across the sky in the same path. According to physicist Donald Olson, only four occurrences are known:[1]

  • 18 August 1783 Great Meteor[1][2]
  • 20 July 1860 Great Meteor; believed by Olson to be the event referred to in Walt Whitman's poem Year of Meteors, 1859–60[3][4]
  • 21 December 1876 Great Meteor; sighted over Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania[5]
  • 9 February 1913 Great Meteor Procession; a chain of slow, large meteors moving from northwest to southeast, sighted over North America, particularly in Canada, the North Atlantic and the Tropical South Atlantic

Oil painting by Frederic Edwin Church, The 1860 Great Meteor

See also

References
  1. Falk, Dan (1 June 2010). "Forensic astronomer solves Walt Whitman mystery: CultureLab (blog)". New Scientist. Archived from the original on 21 March 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2023.
  2. "Notes and Queries". Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. 8: 221–222. June 1914. Bibcode:1914JRASC...8..221. Retrieved 8 February 2023.
  3. "Forensic astronomer solves Walt Whitman mystery". New Scientist. 1 June 2010. Retrieved 8 February 2023.
  4. "150-year-old meteor mystery solved". MSNBC. 2 June 2010. Archived from the original on 5 June 2010. Retrieved 8 February 2023.
  5. Herschel, Alexander Stewart (1878). "Observations of luminous meteors". Report of the forty-seventh meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: Held at Plymouth in August 1877. John Murray. pp. 149–153.


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