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September 7, 2005
look, up in the sky!
I had an amazing 24 hours of sky-watching. It began Monday night, when the waters of Puget Sound calmed down enough to reflect light, and red Mars rose over the horizon. A brilliant band of pink stretched for five miles right to my feet. Tuesday evening, I was relaxing in the hot tub and watching clouds go by when a giant bald eagle flew 40 feet overhead, searching for prey. When he flew directly over me, he completely stopped, midair, for maybe ten seconds, trying to ascertain whether my head was a big, bald rabbit. The maneuver defied physics. It was Wile E. Coyote sort of wrong. Then last night, while I sat on the back deck and listened to Dorkass talk about The Miracle, I saw the International Space Station whip from horizon to horizon. All that was nothing, though, compared to what happened next. A meteor splashed into the Sound not two miles from my house. For scale, imagine a red hot coal, about the size of your fingernail when held at arm's length, tumbling and falling at great speed while trailing a shower of distinct orange sparks. I've never witnessed the like: you could actually see the orange-yellow outline of the enormous meteor rock.
I'll save you from doing the algebra: using my fingernail and arm's length as a basis, the meteor was 88 feet in diameter.*
*Margin of error: +/- 85 feet
posted by john at 8:29 AM • permalink