Aurora Borealis (General)

by ChrisW , Tuesday, September 09, 2008, 13:18 (5928 days ago) @ gerrym

From the American Physical Society.

I wonder if this is what you saw?

Received 28 October 1946

The meteor shower of October 9-10, 1946, produced intense ionization in the upper atmosphere. This phenomenon provides the first opportunity to calculate directly the energy required to produce an ionospheric layer. The necessary power is found to be a few watts per square kilometer, a value comfortably exceeded by the blackbody radiation of the sun in the region of 1000A.