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August 18, 1783
A meteor procession blazed across the night sky over Great Britain.
Meteor procession
A meteor procession occurs when an Earth-grazing meteor breaks apart, and the fragments travel across the sky in the same path. According to physicist Donald Olson, only four occurrences are known:
- 18 August 1783 Great Meteor
- 20 July 1860 Great Meteor; believed by Olson to be the event referred to in Walt Whitman's poem Year of Meteors, 1859–60
- 21 December 1876 Great Meteor; sighted over Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania
- 9 February 1913 Great Meteor Procession; a chain of slow, large meteors moving from northwest to southeast, sighted over North America, particularly in Canada, the North Atlantic and the Tropical South Atlantic
1783 Great Meteor
The 1783 Great Meteor was a meteor procession observed on 18 August 1783 from the British Isles, at a time when such phenomena were not well understood. The meteor was the subject of much discussion in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and was the subject of a detailed study by Charles Blagden.