Here's the Astro map for the sighting of the fireball which was seen streaking over Texas on Sunday morning ( 15 Feb 2009, 11am, Austin) and is thought to have plummeted to the ground somewhere in Northern Texas. I guess if anyone out there in Texas is interested in locating a possible impact point, the best place to start hunting would be under the ACG lines +/- 50 miles either side. Especially where the white arrows are pointing to the intersection of the horizontal and vertical lines.
There are various confusing reports across the web as to whether this was remnants of the recent satellite collision but 'experts' appear to be confirming it was a meteor. In which case this can be chalked up as another 'spooky' coincidence for me because, whilst searching for something completely unrelated, last week ( 11/02), I came across this:
In the year 1871, on Sunday, the 8th of October, at half past nine o'clock in the evening, events occurred which attracted the attention of the whole world, which caused the death of hundreds of human beings, and the destruction of millions of property, and which involved three different States of the Union in the wildest alarm and terror.The summer of 1871 had been excessively dry; the moisture seemed to be evaporated out of the air; and on the Sunday above named the atmospheric conditions all through the Northwest were of the most peculiar character. The writer was living at the time in Minnesota, hundreds of miles from the scene of the disasters, and he can never forget the condition of things. There was a parched, combustible, inflammable, furnace-like feeling in the air, that was really alarming. It felt as if there were needed but a match, a spark, to cause a world-wide explosion. It was weird and unnatural. I have never seen nor felt anything like it before or since. Those who experienced it will bear me out in these statements.
At that hour, half past nine o'clock in the evening, at apparently the same moment, at points hundreds of miles apart, in three different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, fires of the most peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as we know, by spontaneous combustion.
Now the weather in these 3 U.S. states or Texas at present is far from unusually dry and combustible, and no one has been killed, but the reason that I sat up and took notice of what I was reading was due to the remarkable coincidence of the writers description of the fires to those stories that were coming out of Victoria, Australia regarding their bushfires. Many in Victoria were astounded by the speed of the fires and reported them as travelling like tornadoes of fire and here's what I was reading in what I had stumbled across:
It was no ordinary fire. I quote:
"At sundown there was a lull in the wind and comparative stillness. For two hours there were no signs of danger; but at a few minutes after nine o'clock, and by a singular coincidence, precisely the time at which the Chicago fire commenced, the people of the village heard a terrible roar. It was that of a tornado, crushing through the forests. Instantly the heavens were illuminated with a terrible glare. The sky, which had been so dark a moment before, burst into clouds of flame.
Some of you may recognise this text. It turns out I had landed on a page, mid-book, and I was reading Ragnarok - the Age of Fire & Gravel. A controversial tome written in 1883 by Ignatius Donnelly. The page I had happened upon was about Biela's Comet but the whole book is about comet/meteor impacts on Earth throughout history.
Ok, so you are thinking, what's this got to do with a meteor over Texas? Well, it seems that it was pure coincidence about the awful accounts coming from Oz, as many are suspected of being caused by arson. However the appearance of this Texan meteor has 'rekindled' my interest in what I was reading because the book goes on to recount how the author believes that Earth was passing through debris associated with Beila's Comet and that the unusual atmospheric, tinderbox, conditions in 1871 were related to the comet. Indeed he seems to propose that the great conflagration was caused by fragments of rock, in the wake of the comet's tail, falling to Earth.
This made my mind leap to the fact that up in the sky at this time we have Comet Lulin, just days away from making it's closest pass to Earth. My train of thought now therefore, is - is this latest meteor sighting related to Comet Lulin? Additionally, it has to be asked, are the unusual atmospheric conditions down-under in Australia related to the fact that we have a Comet or maybe vice versa; do we have a Comet ( and recently more bright and unexpected ones than normal) due to peculiar changes in the electromagnetic fields in the atmosphere, (which are coincident with a new Sunspot cycle which peaks in 2011/12)?
I'm loathe to continue this line of reasoning because patently the last thing I am is an Astrophysicist or meteorologist BUT, in my experience, when I am led to these things entirely by accident they are usually something to take note of. So, if you feel so inclined, drop me a line if you have knowledge of whether Lulin and the meteor ( and/or dry conditions in Oz) could be related and I'll report back here on this site.
Meanwhile, you may like to hop over to Donnelly's fascinating book. This page, if you scroll down gives you chapter titles and the ones on comets are, to say the least, thought provoking.
I'll leave you with this quote from the book
...the meteor-shower experienced in Europe on November 27th was unquestionably due to the passage near the earth of a meteoric trail traveling in the track of the comet.and the chart for the 1871 event. Tr Saturn trine Pluto. Tr Pluto conjunct Saturn. This makes the Saturn/Pluto paran on Sunday's ACG map look more than interesting!
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