and lights accompanying some meteoric falls convinced early humans that meteorites came from the

gods; accordingly these objects were widely regarded with awe and veneration. This association of
meteorites with the miraculous and religious made 18th-century scientists suspicious of their reality.
Members of the French Academy, which was then considered the highest scientific authority, were
convinced that the fall of stones from heaven was impossible. Keepers of European museums discarded
genuine meteorites as shameful relics of a superstitious past. Against this background, the German
physicist Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni began the science of meteoritics in 1794, when he defended the
trustworthiness of accounts of falls. A shower of stones that fell in 1803 at L’Aigle, Fr., finally convinced
the scientific world of the reality of meteorites. Interest was intensified by the great meteor shower of
Nov. 12, 1833, which was visible in North America. Most natural-history museums now have meteorite
collections.

For many years the only method of observing meteors was with the naked eye. The observer would plot
the path of a meteor among the stars on a chart and note its apparent magnitude, the time, and other
information. A similar plot of the same meteor made about 60 km (40 miles) away permitted rough
estimates to be made of its altitude and the true angle of its path. This data can now be obtained more
accurately with photographic or radar techniques, but visual observation continues to provide
information on the magnitudes of meteors and serves as a check of instrumental methods. Binoculars
and telescopes extend the range of visual observations from the 5th or 6th magnitude, the limit of the
unaided eye, to the 12th or 13th. Direct photographs of a meteor’s trail (the column of ionized gases
formed by the passage of a meteoric body through the upper atmosphere) taken at two points on the
Earth’s surface several kilometres apart yield the most accurate data for tracing the path of a meteor.
Specially designed wide-angle, high-speed cameras are employed. A rapidly rotating shutter in front of
the open lens makes it possible to photograph the meteor trail in short segments, from which the
velocity and deceleration of a meteor can be computed.

Radar is also widely used for meteor detection and observation. Radar pulses (short bursts of radio-
frequency energy) emitted from a ground-based transmitter are reflected by a meteor’s trail. The
distance to the meteor can be determined by measuring the time lapse between the transmitted and
reflected radar signals. Its motion toward (or away from) the radar facility can be derived from the rate
at which the distance changes, which in turn yields the velocity of the object in the line of sight.