OBSERVATIONS OF LUMINOUS METEORS. 307 



College and Corstorphine hill (a little north of west from Edinburgh) 

 that he ran to an opposite window to see it fall there, hut it did not 

 reappear. At Bathgate, 18 miles west of Edinburgh, "it came in sight 

 about 20° above the horizon, S.S.E., and went up N.N.W., nearly right 

 overhead." — (' Observer,' the ' Scotsman,' May 16th.) The above pro- 

 jection of the meteor's path, derived from the York account, passes mid- 

 way between Edinburgh and Bathgate ; and as the note of its course at 

 Bathgate contains no statement if the meteor's point of disappearance, 

 when nearly overhead, was on the east or west side of the zenith point, 

 the end point cannot be assigned more exactly from these descriptions 

 than at a height of about 20 miles above the Firth of Forth near Linlith- 

 gow, to which point, lying W.N.W. from Edinburgh and N.N.E. from 

 Bathgate, the track would pass about 20° west and east respectively of 

 the zenith points of those two places. 



To determine the inclination of the meteor's descending path to the 

 earth's surface, no sufficiently exact observations were recorded ; but it 

 may nevertheless be inferred, with considerable probability, from the com- 

 bined descriptions. When first seen in the S.S.E., at Edinburgh, its 

 altitude was not much greater than that of the moon (31°), and it began 

 at an altitude of 20° only, according to the account at Bathgate. Recol- 

 lecting that apparent altitudes are always much over-estimated by the 

 unassisted eye, and that the initial point as seen at Edinburgh must have 

 been above the meteor's radiant point at least some few degrees, it seems 

 scarcely possible to assign a much higher altitude than about 20° for the 

 radiant point, or a much steeper slope of the meteor's path than this 

 towards the earth's surface. This is also the slope of a line of flight 

 from 50 miles above the Tyne valley to 20 miles above Linlithgow, where 

 two points of the real path were found to lie approximately ; and it 

 passes 36 miles from Galashiels, a distance which requires 3 minutes 

 (instead of two minutes, which is said to have elapsed) for sound to 

 traverse it. If a lower height of about 15 miles near Linlithgow is 

 adopted for the end point (which seems very probable), the slope of the 

 resulting real path is then 22° ; in the first case the height which the real 

 path prolonged backwards had at Northallerton was 72 miles, and in the 

 last case 78 miles, and the distance of the meteor's track from Galashiels 

 is 34 miles in the latter case, instead of 36, as in the former one. The 

 heights of 72 and 78 miles over Northallerton agree very well with the 

 height of 75 or 80 miles over the same place at which Mr. Clark esti- 

 mated, from a collective projection of all the English observations, that 

 the meteor began its flight ; but by the removal of the end point from a 

 place near Hawick to one at about the same vertical height near Edin- 

 burgh, the slope of path is diminished from 38°, as deduced from the 

 English observations, to 20° or 22° when the views of the fireball ob- 

 tained about Edinburgh and in some other parts of Scotland are included. 

 The observers' positions at Stonykirk (near Stranraer) in Wigtonshire, 

 and at Preston, were, of all the places where it was observed, the most 

 favourable, by the flank views which its descending path there presented 

 for determining the radiant-point ; but the apparent slope at those places 

 was not noted, and at Stonykirk only one datum of the meteor's appa- 

 rent position was recorded, that the splendid sight of its passage in the 

 heavens was in the direction of New Galloway, which, when prolonged far 

 enough from Stonykirk, coincides with the position of the meteor over 

 Galashiels. 



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