Nearly 100 years ago, George Gaylord Simpson wrote his masterpiece about fieldwork in Argentina, Attending Marvels. I’ve been attending marvels all my life, and yesterday’s was a doozy!
The early morning sun was just topping the Peloncillos, and already the land all around was well-lit. I was outside walking on my second-story balcony, when a flaming turquoise meteorite, shot through with yellow and orange, and trailing a tail like a comet’s, flashed past between my home and Portal Peak, just above eye level and at very close range––at most a quarter-mile away. Its rounded “head” was a mass of twisting turquoise flames. It was astonishingly beautiful.
It streaked past at a very shallow angle, almost parallel to the low ridge near my home. As it cleared that ridge, it suddenly disintegrated: first, the tail turned ashy black with sparkles of light, and quickly the change enveloped the whole meteorite, until only a wispy cloud of black, shot through with sparkles, lingered briefly over the ridge, no more than 20 or 30 feet above the ground. Then it, too, vanished, dusting the ridge with ashes.
Although a low-pitched, almost subliminal, crackling likely first drew my attention to the fireball, I heard no explosion as it disintegrated.
I shivered and tingled all the rest of the day.
To fix the image in my memory, I painted a set of three tiles depicting the fireball. The meteorite in this image is greatly simplified: what I actually saw was a much more detailed boiling of scintillant turquoise flames, with only narrow streaks of yellow and orange, but at least this gets the idea across. The unfired colors shown here are pastel versions of the fired tiles. The final colors will be much deeper and more intense. When these have been fired, I’ll mount them along the base of the balcony, to commemorate this breathtaking wonder.
And that incredible turquoise color? The chemical makeup of the meteor determines the color as it burns through our atmosphere. Sodium produces orange-yellow; iron, yellow; magnesium, blue-green; calcium, violet; and atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen, red. (Thank you, Wikipedia!)
This turquoise fireball was seen from Sonoita and from Hereford, where Glenn E. Weeks photographed it high in the sky. Weeks posted his photo on Facebook, under the group Cochise County and Its Wonders.
Just before the meteorite reached me, Scott Maderas watched it from Portal, as it cleared Cathedral Rock. If anyone else saw it, please let me know!
Some folks regard fireballs through a lens of fear, saying that they portend catastrophe. Even Shakespeare wrote: “When paupers die, there are no portents seen / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.” But even for those inclined to omens, how could something so beautiful and so integral to our planetary ecology be wrong? Even the dinosaurs close to their impact event must have witnessed something truly magnificent in their last few seconds of life. What a way to go. We hold too tightly to that which we know.
For me, yesterday’s close encounter was, if not an omen, a wakeup call––a stunning reminder to attend the marvels all around us.
Love it! Wish I had seen it.