[X] My Assistant

[paxdan]

Google maps showing Meteor Impact Craters. Pretty neat stuff.

[dvandorn]

Several years ago, I was driving through Wisconsin at about 2 a.m. In the wilds of Wisconsin, it gets pretty dark out, and there was no Moon that night.

I saw a fireball that came over the horizon just at the left extremity of my windshield view and then arced across the sky, directly in my field of view. It was bright blue-white, leaving a greenish trail behind it. As it approached the far horizon, almost exactly aimed at the right visual limit of the windshield, it appeared to fragment and explode into sparkles.

There was, as I say, no Moon, so this thing looked very bright to me, but it might not have been super-bright. (I did see it very clearly over the glare of my headlights on the road ahead of me, though.) One thing I do recall, the *entire* trail glowed with a greenish glow for several seconds after the event. It was too dark to see a contrail after that glow dissipated, I'm sorry to say. The area where the fireball seemed to explode seemed to glow for several more seconds than the rest of the trail, maybe for as long as 10 or 15 seconds.

I'd guess that the whole traverse of my visual field took maybe one and a half seconds -- too fast for a re-entering satellite.

That was the brightest fireball I've ever seen, although the "meteor storm" a few years back was one of the most fascinating meteor events I've ever seen. You'd get clusters of trails, not just the occasional streak. I was looking directly at the source point in the sky when a starburst of five meteors flashed towards me, making a near-perfect five-pointed star in the sky... That was simply spectacular!

-the other Doug