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Written by Tom Ford
The sky is on fire.Well, maybe not on fire" as such. More sort of smouldering. A bit more conscious than usual. Dammit, so I"ve fallen for a slinky little chunk of hyperbole: it would be more accurate to describe the dying embers I"m seeing flash briefly across the sky every half-minute or so as the dusty orbital leavings of 16-mile-wide comet Swift-Tuttle flash-frying themselves against the Earth"s atmosphere. But it"s not so poetic. Whatever, the star-speckled blanket of midnight is currently being slashed by little trails of superheated plasma smearing themselves across the firmament. It might not have the same effortless intensity as a man-made fireworks display, but knowing that we"re watching tiny pieces of space rock make the change from meteoroids (in space) to meteors (when they hit the atmosphere) to occasionally meteorites (if they actually make landfall) at 37 miles per second, it all just seems a little bit grander.Photography: John WycherleyThis feature was originally published in issue 289 of Top Gear magazine
Date written: 17 Dec 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 6152
The sky is on fire.Well, maybe not on fire" as such. More sort of smouldering. A bit more conscious than usual. Dammit, so I"ve fallen for a slinky little chunk of hyperbole: it would be more accurate to describe the dying embers I"m seeing flash briefly across the sky every half-minute or so as the dusty orbital leavings of 16-mile-wide comet Swift-Tuttle flash-frying themselves against the Earth"s atmosphere. But it"s not so poetic. Whatever, the star-speckled blanket of midnight is currently being slashed by little trails of superheated plasma smearing themselves across the firmament. It might not have the same effortless intensity as a man-made fireworks display, but knowing that we"re watching tiny pieces of space rock make the change from meteoroids (in space) to meteors (when they hit the atmosphere) to occasionally meteorites (if they actually make landfall) at 37 miles per second, it all just seems a little bit grander.Photography: John WycherleyThis feature was originally published in issue 289 of Top Gear magazine
Date written: 17 Dec 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 6152
