Found this post / this thread / this forum after running a Google search for "slow moving meteors". As to the reason for that search, I'd previously been to a meteor reporting website -- also found via a Google search -- but discovered there was no point in me filing anything because my description didn't tally with anything the site recognized. So-oo. . .
My wife and I are in our mid-60s and our days of heading out to party on New Year's Eve have long gone. No regrets. Was fun while it lasted. Me, I can't even be bothered to stay up until midnight, but my wife always does: feminine stamina, or some such. This year -- or rather last year, December 31st, 2012 -- was pretty much the same as usual: I went to bed with a book at 10.30pm, she stayed in the lounge, watching a BBC TV welcome-in-the-New-Year show.
Before I quit the TV festivities to go read that book, she warned me that it would be pointless to go to sleep, seeing as how there's always a New Year fireworks party somewhere near to us, even though we've never known precisely where. Anyway. There'd be a lot of bangs and wheeeees and sleep-busting pyrotechnics, and she wasn't going to head to bed and fall asleep only to be awoken again.
We live in northwest England, about 30 miles from the west coast and the Irish Sea. We're on the fringe of The Lake District. We're not in a city but a semi-rural environment, a city suburb but pretty pastoral even so. The rear of our property faces North. Our bedroom faces North. Our upstairs lounge, however, is at the front of the property and faces South.
So much for the stats.
I read my book for maybe a half hour or so then fell asleep. At midnight, the predicted whizzes and bangs woke me up. I lay there for a few minutes then decided, I'd wander into the lounge, see what my wife was watching on TV: there was bound to be a live newscast from London, where they really know how to burn money in the game of playing Capital Cities.
But when I went into the lounge, the TV was off and all the lights were off and my wife was gazing up at the sky. There was a roughly three-quarter moon, slightly veiled by a cloud haze, but otherwise the night sky was fairly clear to view. My wife said she'd turned off the TV at midnight because she'd wanted to watch the neighbourhood fireworks -- which had actually started before midnight, and, by the time I arrived, were finished and done with.
She said it was a shame I'd missed them, because after the display had finished, there'd been nothing for a couple of minutes or so and then they';d started sending up the prettiest fireworks she'd ever seen: small red balls of light that tracked slowly across the sky, moving from her right to her left. And "slowly" was the key word here: they took "a long time" to transit past our window.
I know little if anything about fireworks and still less, about astronomy, but I do know that fireworks don't actually go skywards and then make a left or right turn and continue on, high in the sky and parallel to the ground. Gravity tends to have a bearing on their behaviour -- that, and the amount of combustible material available.
No, my wife said. They definitely were. . . Fireworks. They weren't comets or shooting stars. They were single glowing red lights. She'd seen four or five of them tracking past her, the glow being the "burning bit" at the end of each firework. Then, a few moments later, there'd been two or three, one after another, travelling yet again at a really slooooo-oooow speed and separated either by height or distance or both.
Significantly though: she'd never seen the fireworks actually going up into the sky. And definitely never saw them fall. There was no climactic explosion, so fiery descent of firework fragments. They just. . . sailed. . . slowly by and then quickly, though not ultra-rapidly, faded out.
We don't live anywhere near an airport. Or a military base. Or in the track of air force night flights -- of which there aren't any, anyway. Not around here. The likelihood of a squadron of military aircraft coming past in the opening minutes of New Year's Day was, and is, unbelievable. We know enough about how the military works to know that it doesn't send over-flights up at the peak moment of a national holiday. Light aircraft, perhaps? Again: no. Civil aviation night flight rules notwithstanding, one would be hard pushed to get a host of Cessnas and Pipers up into the air. Big commercial jets? Well, we've flown enough of those in our time to know they don't have a single, fixed, unblinking red tail or wing or nose beacon.
Ah well. Neither my wife nor I are, er, imaginative. And we wouldn't know 'fanciful' if we fell over it. If, as she said, she had seen very slow-=moving unblinking red lights going from West to East in the night sky, then, um, she definitely did. And -- as far as I was concerned -- if she didn't see those lights ascending, or descending, or exploding, then either they were fireworks or, um. . . Meteors. Small meteors. Because I thought, that's what a meteor would look like, never having encountered one myself.
My wife decided to turn in but I was wide awake now so went up another floor to the very top of our home and switched on the computer. I figured I'd Google to see if there were any reports of an expected meteor storm, or whatever it's called, over Northern Britain in the opening moments of 2013. My computer acts as if it's of an even greater age than I am, so getting it up and running takes a small eternity.
I figured, I'd turn off the study light, open the window wide, and look out to see if there was any sign of a late-arriving meteor. Just on the off-chance. Because I'd clearly missed out on seeing. . . Something.
Looking to my left, I immediately saw, on the Western horizon, a. . . red light in the sky. Small but steady. Distinctive, yet devoid of any other attribute: no tail, no other coloration. The redness was that of a hot cinder. A small hot cinder in the sky.
And it was moving, albeit almost imperceptibly, in my direction.
I watched its onward progress for another 10 seconds or sol, then went back down the stairs, into our bedroom, and told my wife that another "firework" was on its way. She hadn't had time to go to sleep, so she joined me at the bedroom window as I folded back the drapes and then tugged at the cord of the blinds to send them all the way up. I'd guess at least -- at least -- 30 seconds had elapsed since I'd first seen "my" firework.
With the window open -- we were listening out for an aircraft engine -- we watched the glowing red cinder drawing ever nearer. Moving sloooowly and steadily and absolutely dead level with the ground. How high it was, I've no idea: we had no reference point with which to calibrate that. How slow or how fast, equally: no idea -- perception of speed relates to distance, as far as I'm aware. All we knew -- both of us: two ordinary unimaginative and tediously pragmatic individuals -- was that a red light (which my wife said was identical in aspect and motion to all the other "fireworks" she'd recently seen) was transiting from West to East and above us in the sky and level with the ground. No illusion. No mistake. And definitely: no noise.
Like a couple of spectators at a tennis game, our heads swung slowly from left to right until we could no longer see our "firework". The red cinder was there and then it. . . dwindled. And then it was gone.
Nothing in my Internet searches later that same New Year's Day matched anything we'd seen. We learned all about a Quantid shower (or something) but that wasn't forecast until January 3rd and anyway, it seemed to be for the viewing pleasure of skywatchers on the USA east coast, not for folks living near England's west coast.
Subsequently, we've checked the local newspapers but there are no reports of anyone seeing anything unusual. Or else they may have thought they just saw some slow-moving, er, fireworks. Finally, a Google search took me to that meteor-spotting website I mentioned earlier, but when I got to the stage of actually filling in a report form, the website said, in effect, that slow moving meteors don;t exist so please don't report any such sighting here.
Thus it was that typing in "slow moving meteors" brought me to this thread.
What my wife and I saw is so uncannily like that which Serendipity has witnessed that, in fairness to Serendipity, we thought we'd add our own account here.
It may not take this issue much further. But so long as Serendipity realizes that he / she isn't alone, that suits us. We didn't see (a) aircraft (b) balloons (c) fireworks (d) satellites (e) shooting stars or, as now seems to be the case, (f) "slow moving meteors". We did, however, definitely and absolutely see. . . Something. Just wish we knew what it was -- or, in my wife's case, what all of them were: more than a week later, we're still frustrated at not knowing. . .
