Meteorites- Thomas Jefferson, upon hearing the description of Yale University scientists of a fireball that exploded over Weston, Connecticut on December 14th, 1807, yielding about 330 pounds of stony materials.
Shooting stars that cross our night sky are not really stars, but pieces of rock burning in the
atmosphere. They are meteors - meteorites when they hit the ground. Most meteorites are made
of stone, but since they look like ordinary rock they are seldom recognized. It is the more rare iron
meteorites that dominate collections. Twelve meteorites have been recovered in New York, the most
recent in Peekskill in 1992.
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