OBSERVATIONS OF LUMINOUS METEOKS. 269* 



Lancashire and Cheshire, was responded to by frilly 120 communications, 

 the substance of which Captain Tupman has discussed and presented in 

 three papers, which are contained in the first yearly volume of the newly 

 edited and published journal of Astronomy, ' The Observatory ' (at pp. 

 282, 316, and 351). The general features of the fireball, and of two 

 others seen on the same evening, are discussed, with a plate of several 

 phases of its appearance seen by Mr. Plant at Manchester, in the first ; 

 and the materials furnished for comparison, with particulars of the in- 

 dividual accounts, and with the final results to which their examination 

 led him, are presented in the remaining two of Captain Tupman's papers. 

 The same letter in the ' Times ' which invited these communications also 

 described a meteor of singular interest and brightness, seen by Captain 

 Tupman at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, on the night of Novem- 

 ber 27th, which will be the subject of the following paragraph of thi& 

 Appendix. A striking statement of an observer at Queenstown, Cork 

 Harbour, followed in a few lines after the impression of the same letter, 

 that at the hour of the fireball's appearance a meteor of extreme bril- 

 liancy was observed travelling, in bright moonlight, across the northern 

 sky, showing the vast extent of country over which this large meteor, 

 which burst forth directly over Liverpool, was satisfactorily observed. 

 A fireball only slightly less conspicuous was, it appears, noticed at 

 several places at 7 h 25 m , an hour before the appearance of the lai'ge one,, 

 and sufficient accounts of its course and apparent path were forwarded 

 to Captain Tupman from observers who were fortunate enough to witness 

 both meteors, to show that it was probably a member of the same meteor 

 stream and diverged from the same radiant-point as the larger one. A 

 detonating fireball of great brilliancy was also seen at Strassburg, on the 

 same evening, at 6 o'clock p.m.* 



The position of this fireball focus, or centre of emanation of at least 

 one detonating or aerolitic fireball of the 23rd of last November is 

 sufficiently remarkable to become the source of a new series of conjectures 

 and researches regarding any aerolitic or detonating meteors that may in 

 future times be observed ; for it was discovered that in the real direction 

 of its flight this unusually striking fireball's radiant-point agrees in 

 position with that of a very notable and important star-shower diverging 

 from near the Pleiades and Hyades in the middle and early part of No- 

 vember. The star-shower thus indicated, known, since Mr. Denning's 

 and Mr. Corder's successful investigations of it in November, 1876, as 

 " Taurids I.," was found by Mr. Denning, among frequent rich displays of 

 its meteors in that year, to reach a conspicuous maximum on the morning 

 of November 20th, 1876, with a radiant-point marked with the greatest 

 certainty at 62° + 22°. It is exactly at this place that by a complete dis- 

 cussion of all the observations furnished to him, Captain Tupman found 

 that the great detonating meteor's radiant-point of the 23rd of November 

 last was situated. It is thus a very plain and obvious inference that the 

 shooting stars forming the body of the stream which the earth encounters 

 striking it from Taurus about the middle, and on a few later nights of 

 November, are of the same hard, compact materials, in smaller fragments, 

 as that of which the fireball must have been composed to produce the 

 loud and violent concussion of the air with which its explosion was marked 

 by a thunder-like report in Wales, Lancashire, and the Isle of Man. 



* ' Strassburg Gazette ; ' and 'Nature,' vol. xvii. p. 1 14. 



