Week 27
This Week in History: June 28-July 4
JUNE 28, 1911: A meteorite falls to the ground near the village of El Nakhla El Bahariya, Egypt. The Nakhla meteorite was one of the first-known meteorites determined to have come from Mars. A fragment of the Nakhla meteorite supposedly struck and killed a dog, although there has been no independent confirmation of this. “Martian …
Comet of the Week: Tebbutt 1861 II
Perihelion: 1861 June 12.01, q = 0.822 AU Two of the brighter comets of the latter half of the 19th Century were discovered by an Australian amateur astronomer, John Tebbutt, who for four decades essentially ran a one-man astronomical clearinghouse from his private observatory near Windsor, New South Wales. In addition to numerous astrometric observations …
Special Topic: The Tunguska Event and Other Recent Impacts
During the early morning hours on Tuesday, June 30, 1908, at around 7:17 A.M. local time, “something” entered the earth’s atmosphere near the Pacific coast of Asia, traveling northwestward. A few km above the surface of a largely uninhabited region of central Siberia, near the Stony Tunguska River some 90 km north-northwest of the village …