PLEASE NOTE:
*
Date sent: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 15:42:59 -0500 (EST)
From: HUMBPEIS B.J.PEISER@livjm.ac.uk
Subject: Re: A Hit in Honduras?
To: cambridge-conference@livjm.ac.uk
Priority: NORMAL
S&T Newswire from SKY & TELESCOPE (March 1997)
Late-Breaking Astronomical News
A HIT IN HONDURAS?
(San Luis, Honduras) Reports continue to tickle in about
a brilliant fireball that lit up the sky over remote
sections of Central America on the night of November 22,
1996. Residents near the border of Honduras and Guatemala
say a red-and-yellow bolide traveled east to west across
the sky. It appeared to be a single object, at least 1@
wide, whose passage was accompanied by a loud, explosive
sound. Marco Antonio Gonzalez, an amateur astronomers in
Guatemala, says the bolide appeared within 30 seconds of
10:10 p.m. local time.
The next day a large landslide covering several acres was
found on a steep slope of the jungle-covered mountain
Cerro Negro, 14 kilometers from San Luis. Whether the
landslide was caused by water saturation, a meteorite's
impact, or both is not yet clear. Maria Christina Pineda
de Carias, who directs the observatory of the National
Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) in Tegucigalpa,
visited the remote site twice in December. Her teams
collected eyewitness reports but found no meteorites. Nor
was any trace of the fireball or an airburst evident in
preliminary searches of satellite imagery near the time
of the event.
However, meteorite dealer Marvin Killgore also ventured
to San Luis in late December, and he believes something
slammed into the mountainside. There is some hint of a
crater 50 meters across, he reports, though the
landslide has covered most of the putative impact site.
"There's no real ejecta or evidence for an explosion,"
Killgore says, though he found cracks in the ground more
than 1 km away. If the impacting object were a single
iron meteorite, Killgore speculates, it could have a mass
of 200 to 300 tons.
What exactly lies beneath the landslide may soon be
resolved. Teams of impact specialists from the United
States and Canada were preparing to visit the site in
late January.
*
Date sent: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 08:22:17 -0500 (EST)
From: HUMBPEIS B.J.PEISER@livjm.ac.uk
Subject: GRAECIA Book announcement <fwd>
To: cambridge-conference@livjm.ac.uk
Priority: NORMAL
On Thu, 20 Feb 1997 14:32:40 -0600 Owen Doonan
opdoonan@midway.uchicago.edu
wrote:
> I am forwarding this message for
John Ramsey, please reply to comet.uic.edu.
>
> A new book, *The Comet of 44 BC and Caesar's Funeral Games*
(Scholars Press
> 1997) will be published on the Ides of March, the 2040th
anniversary of
> Caesar's assassination. Written by John Ramsey of the
Classics Dept. and
> Lewis Licht of the Physics Dept. at the Univ. of Illinois at
Chicago, this
> study draws upon sources from China, as well as the
Greco-Roman world, to
> shed new light on the probable orbit of the great daylight
comet of July 44
> BC and on the factors that caused it to be treated not as a
baleful omen (as
> comets invariably were) but as a sign of Caesar's
apotheosis. For details,
> including an abstract, please visit
> http://www.uic.edu/las/clas/comet;
or send e-mail to comet@uic.edu
>
> Cheers,
> John