Spectacular rare green meteor lights up morning sky

Hmmm... coming in from the Southern Hemisphere.....

A rare bright-green meteor flew across the sky early yesterday, surprising early risers around the country.

Denise Buckton of Auckland's Blockhouse Bay said she gasped when she saw the meteor from her living room window.

"It was lovely to look at. It had the same brightness as a flare."

Stardome Observatory spokesman Warren Hurley said the meteor was particularly bright and larger than average, at 20-50cm in diameter.

It flew across at 7.07am, providing a rare daytime spectacle.

It was first visible at an altitude of about 80km in the north and at about 20km when last seen in the south.

www.nzherald.co.nz...

A run through the jungle is too easy; for the ultimate reality show contest, try a race through the Sun's atmosphere, where two comets recently lost their heads. The tails from a pair of comets survived a close encounter with the Sun, even after the Sun's intense heat and radiation vaporized their heads (nuclei and coma), an extremely rare event photographed by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft.

On May 24, 2003, a pair of comets arced in tandem towards the Sun, their paths taking them to just 0.1 solar radii above the Sun's surface, deep within the searing multimillion-degree solar atmosphere (corona).

They belong to the Kreutz family of sun-grazing comets, often seen by the SOHO spacecraft while diving towards their final rendezvous with the Sun. But as in humans, twins are rare. Even more so, this pair showed another very unusual trait: What looks like a faint tail (or "puff of smoke") can be seen moving away from the Sun, seemingly emanating from a point in the orbit beyond the comet's closest approach. Normally, sungrazers simply fade and disappear at an earlier stage, obliterated by the Sun's intense heat and radiation pressure.

www.gsfc.nasa.gov...

On May 24, 2003, a pair of comets arced in tandem towards the Sun, their paths taking them to just 0.1 solar radii above the Sun's surface, deep within the searing multimillion-degree solar atmosphere (corona).

Very interesting indeed. I love the lagtime on the "official" response- June 10. Took them awhile to come up with the right story, they learned their lesson with that last near-miss that they covered up back in Feb (Comet NEAT).

Seems to be a pattern, especially with near misses. Last year, we had three (3) near misses (and I mean NEAR, crossing inside the lunar orbit), all of them were NOT reported until AFTER they had departed.

At the risk of bringing yet another deabte on my head *cough* Byrd *cough*, NASA and thier consultant Rand Corp DID publicy mention that the preferred course of events, in the event that an earth impact was imminent, was to remain SILENT and NOT inform the public.

Yes, I remember reading the transcript of the lecture at that conference. They were very clear that it would not be productive to tell the public, particularly since we are already primed for anxiety from the whole 9/11 thing.

Utter crap, in other words.

3 near misses last year? Well then this makes 2 so far 2003. Keep an eye on HAARP and your seismetometers [sic]. It may be a bumpy ride.

Just as a meteor impact is believed to have brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, scientists say a similar event might have killed many fish and other creatures of an earlier era, about 380 million years ago.

Writing in today's issue of the journal Science, geologists at Louisiana State University, the University of Texas at Arlington and the Scientific Institute in Morocco report several lines of evidence that point to a meteor impact that coincides with a mass extinction at a time when most life was still contained in the oceans.

The middle of the Devonian geological period is called the "age of fishes." The extinction, while global in scale, was less severe than the half-dozen known major extinctions in Earth's history.

www.startribune.com...