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Remarks |
I took my younger sister and a friend out to the middle of nowhere, between Tuskegee and Auburn, AL to watch the 2001 Leonid shower the night/morning of Nov. 17/18. Early the morning of the 18th (the time is a best guess from memory), we witnessed the most spectacular bolide! We were facing an easterly direction. The fireball moved from south to north, was very large & slow moving. It was mostly bright green with hints and waves of other colors with a long, bright, and smoky trail. After around 4 seconds it exploded and the huge remnants (at least 3 or 4 large chunks and numerous smaller pieces) continued along the same path for another 5 seconds or so. The glowing of the trail subsided after a while, but the smoky trail lasted for several minutes. I wrote a member of (and webmaster at the time) the Auburn Astronomical Society, Russell Whigham, a few years later (2008) because I was looking for any photos that may have surreptitiously captured it. He said there were about 20 in their group. The bolide was so bright and lasted so long that everyone there had time to view it. They were up the road from us at Cliff Hill's airstrip. I also reached out to someone in the same group, John Williams, who had taken photographs that night to see if he had captured it. Unfortunately, it was "rogue" and they had all of their equipment pointing in other directions to get good background (Saturn, Aldebaran, etc.). He said neither he nor Mark captured the bolide in question on film even though he had 45+ photos of meteors from that trip. |
