Did anyone see a large comet in1965 or 66 over the missouri/Kansas area? It went overhead in the daylight.?

Question

I remember being at a playground watching my little brothers play and this huge comet went over us, right above us moving from west to east I think. It seemed to be low in the sky and had a huge long tail. This was in the evening near the end of the summer I believe. When it passed over I was sitting in a car facing the direction of its movement and as it passed directly over us the head of it was wider than the windshield of the car. Through the years I have asked many people if they saw it and so far one person in Texas said they saw it and knew the year. They told me more about it but I do not remember what they said. Anyone else see this amazing comet or know what it was? I was in the north part of kansas city mo. when it went over.

Answer 1

What you saw must have been a meteor, not a comet. At first I thought it must have been this:

http://www.maniacworld.com/tetons-meteor...

but that video was shot in 1972. I've had a quick Google but I can't find anything about a sighting in Missouri or Kansas in 1965 or 66. I would have thought it would be notable enough for reports to have appeared in local newspapers, but I don't know if any such reports have made their way on to the Internet by now.

Answer 2

Peace to you, Peace, but comets do not travel across the sky as you noted.  What you saw was a large meteor.  

People confuse them because they both have tails, but in reality they are as different as hair and a transatlantic cable.

Meteors are an atmospheric phenomenon where bits of space debris burn up in the atmosphere.

Comets are huge wandering objects that come in from deep space, sweep around the sun, and go back out to deep space.  A meteor, even the one you saw, is tiny, but looks big and bright because of the fierce heat it generates on entry.  Comets may be 10s of Kilometers wide and have a tail up to hundreds of millions of kms.  

If you saw a comet close enough to see it moving, you would probably die.  Mostly, they are millions of miles way, and can only be seen to move a fraction from night to night, sometimes spending months in our skies.  

______________________________________

PS – there is another possibility.  Space junk  from spent rockets and satellites that re-enter the atmosphere produce the same results as a large meteor.  During that period there were a lot of things going on within the USSR and USA space race.

Answer 3

Hi KCMO!

The greatest comets of our lifetime were in 1996 and 1997.  I remember them well.

Comets in the sky don't look at all like in the cartoons.  They don't flash across the sky.  If you get to see one, it stays on display in the sky for weeks.

The great comet of 1996 looked like the one you describe, except of course it did not move as you looked up at it.  The comet had a misty head, stretched halfway across the sky, and had a tail that would have taken up a significant fraction of your car windscreen.  I saw it in spring, 1996, when its tail stretched across the Big Dipper.  I'd never seen anything like it in the sky before.  

The remarkable thing about the 1996 comet is that it came unusually close to earth, making its tail seem so long and wide.  Also, astronomers had not expected it.  The 1997 comet (I refer to them, by the way, by their year, not by the uncommon names of the astronomers who discovered them) was more conventional.  Considerably farther from earth, you could see the tail distinctly, but it was very, very short, around a noticeably bright but misty head.

Neither of these comets was bright enough to see in the daytime.  Their tails, while easily visible to the naked eye, did not stand out in such a way that they commanded your attention.  The 1996 comet, for instance, could easily be mistaken for the Milky Way except that the Milky Way is nowhere near the Big Dipper in our sky.



I know this isn't a direct answer to your question.  I wasn't around in 1965 to view such an event anyway.  Perhaps it will be of interest the next time we have a noticeable comet.

Answer 4

Comets don't move anywhere near that fast.  In fact, they don't seem to move at all during the night, they move so slowly.  It sounds like you saw a fireball - a big piece of rock hitting the upper atmosphere and burning up.  Small ones you see at night are meteorites or 'shooting stars', but they happen during the day too - it's just that the Sun is too bright to see them, usually.  But if a big enough one hits, you'll see it.  And it sounds like you did.