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Dillard finds 'shooting star' in his backyard

By Rose Hooper
Dillard Mike Dillard of Sylva shows the 2-ounce object he found in his backyard last week after noticing a streak of light outside his living room window. - Herald photo by Rose Hooper Five seconds earlier or five seconds later and Mike Dillard would have missed it.

But Aug. 6 at 10:15 p.m. he just happened to glance out his living room window and caught a glance of an object streaking by, followed by a bluish purple tail.

"It was coming downward, like a bottlerocket just before it hit the ground. But I didn't think it was a bottlerocket 'cause the only thing behind my house was dark woods," said Dillard, who lives near Wal-Mart.

He didn't give it another thought until the next day at work when two of his employees who live at Barkers Creek said they saw a shooting star.

"I asked them about what time that was, and when they told me 10:15 p.m. I got really curious," said Dillard, who went home and searched his yard for the object he saw.

He found the tiny, 2-ounce object that looks like black lava on one side; the other side is a rust-dirt color. "You can tell how it's burned," he said of the charred black side. On the other side, it looks like a piece broke off.

Dillard is pretty amazed and fascinated by what he and others think is a meteor.

"It's a rare phenomenon to have one whiz right by your house," Dillard said. "It's something you might see on some television program, but I never in my life imagined that I would see, or touch, one."

Dillard said he may put the meteor in a glass box at his Dillsboro restaurant, the Well House, for others to see.

On any given night, a few meteors, called sporadic meteors, can be seen in the heavens. Then there are meteor showers when hundreds, even thousands, of meteors fill the night sky.

As comets orbit the sun, they shed an icy, dusty debris stream along the cometıs orbit. If the earth travels through the stream, viewers can see a meteor shower. Meteor showers are usually named for the constellation from which they seem to originate, called the radiant, or for the comet responsible for the shower.

This month the major radiant is Perseids. It is so visible that it has long been a favorite of non-astronomy enthusiasts.

Back to Archive: 08/16/01.