FIREBALL
One of the most interesting of the reports on the august 18th fireball is that Tiberius Cavallo (1749-1809), another Fellow of the Royal Society.
Cavallo [born in Calvizzano, a village in the neighbourhood of Naples], a natural philosopher and physician who was involved with electrical studies and experiments, relates that he watched the fireball from the Windsor Castle north terrace (...)
Cavallo remarks that they had a perfect view of the fireball (meteor of the august 1783) and that everyone of the company contribuited something to his account: Some flashes of lambent light, much like the aurora borealis, were first observed on the northern part of the heavens, which were soon perceived to proceed from a roundish luminous body, nearly as big as the semidiameter of the moon, and almost stationery in the abovementioned point of the heavens (...)
This ball, at the beginning, appeared of a faint bluish light, and soon began to move, at first ascending above the horizon in an oblique direction towards the east... and movin in a direction nearly parallel to the horizon, reached as far as the S.E. by S. where it finally disappeared... A short time after the beginning of its motion, the luminous body passed behind the above mentioned small cloud, so that during this passage we observed only the light that was cast in the heavens from behind the cloud... but as soon as the meteor emerged from behind the cloud, its light was prodigious.
Cavallo [born in Calvizzano, a village in the neighbourhood of Naples], a natural philosopher and physician who was involved with electrical studies and experiments, relates that he watched the fireball from the Windsor Castle north terrace (...)
Cavallo remarks that they had a perfect view of the fireball (meteor of the august 1783) and that everyone of the company contribuited something to his account: Some flashes of lambent light, much like the aurora borealis, were first observed on the northern part of the heavens, which were soon perceived to proceed from a roundish luminous body, nearly as big as the semidiameter of the moon, and almost stationery in the abovementioned point of the heavens (...)
This ball, at the beginning, appeared of a faint bluish light, and soon began to move, at first ascending above the horizon in an oblique direction towards the east... and movin in a direction nearly parallel to the horizon, reached as far as the S.E. by S. where it finally disappeared... A short time after the beginning of its motion, the luminous body passed behind the above mentioned small cloud, so that during this passage we observed only the light that was cast in the heavens from behind the cloud... but as soon as the meteor emerged from behind the cloud, its light was prodigious.
[ Roberta J. M. Olson,Jay M. Pasachoff, Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art ]
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