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Today is the 97th anniversary of the 4th apparition of Our Lady of Fatima.
In the western sky, above Thousand Oaks, CA, this morning, I saw the biggest meteor I have ever seen first hand.
It came silently out of the northern sky at an extremely high speed, at a very steep angle downward, as viewed from my position (I couldn't tell whether it was angled toward me or away from me or by how much), about 65 degrees from the horizontal (25 degrees from the vertical), and at 90 degrees west from Polaris (north star).
It lasted about 2 seconds. It began with a flash of white light, which caught my attention, since I was already, quite by chance, looking in that direction. If I had not been looking that way, I would have missed it entirely.
It quickly formed a bright white streak downward, then erupted into a larger yellow light, changing into orange and then red, as it spewed a cloud of white vapor in all directions, which looked like a billowing cloud only illuminated by the streaking meteor. The cloud was about 10 times wider than the meteor's bright spot, about one inch wide measured by my fingers at arm's length.
I'm thinking that the "cloud" couldn't have been latent, since this happened in an otherwise clear sky with all the stars visible and a bright moon overhead.
As the meteor emerged from the base of the instantly erupting cloud, it faded quickly and disappeared as if burning to nothingness. When its light was gone, the cloud was no longer visible in the night sky, even with a nearly full, bright gibbous moon shining at 11:00 overhead.
It could have been over the ocean west of Port Hueneme and Oxnard.
A jumbo jet was flying northwest directly toward it, as best I could tell, when the meteor disappeared about 10 seconds before the jet passed through the same line of sight from my position. I can hardly imagine the terror the pilot might have felt seeing that coming down at him while flying peacefully through the night sky. I suppose he might have thought that his having had to wait on the tarmac for an extra minute before takeoff, a little while earlier, hadn't been such an inconvenience after all.
It reminded me of the video I saw of the meteor that hit Russia last year (?), but it was only 2 seconds in duration (whereas the Russian one lasted about 15 seconds), and it made no sonic boom or any other audible sound for me to hear. I listened for a minute to be sure.
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Topic: Metor observed in Los Angeles - 2:48 am PDT (UTC - 7) (Read 860 times)