On August 13, 2015, Astronomy Senior Editor Michael E. Bakich shared the experience of watching the Perseid meteor shower with his wife, Holley. Around 4h UT, they saw a magnitude –8 fireball that boasted a brilliant, 35°-long path.
“The coolest thing about it was the color,” Bakich blogged on Astronomy.com. “It started as a classic lemon yellow, but the last 10° of its run took on a distinct coppery hue.” Bakich wondered if this was a “true shift in the meteor’s color or if the red and green cone cells in his eyes were fatigued with an overload of yellow.”
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