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(meteorobs) Green meteors
Hello all:
Each year in late winter when Orion and Cetus drift across the southern and
southwestern sky, I am reminded of the highly impressionable days of my
youth: One evening I watched a bright, greenish-white meteor lazily emerge
from the retreating twilight, to cross Cetus and Eridanus, then fade in
Orion. Not long before that I had read about the rarity of green meteors.
I do not recall the source of that information, nor do I recall ever
seeing another green one.
Two decades later another reference to green meteors came to my attention,
in the work >The Immense Journey< (Vintage Books, NY, 1959) by
anthropologist and wordsmith Loren Eiseley:
"Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things
they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake
while the meteors whisper greenly overhead."
The lingering questions are, how rare are green meteors, and is their color
the result of their composition? Have you seen one or more?
George Kelley
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