.David Dunham, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, videotaped one of the Leonids striking the moon at about 11:46 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesday. Brian Cudnik of Rice University in Houston also witnessed the strike.
"He saw it and I recorded it," said Dunham, who observed from Mount Airy, Maryland. "It looks pretty good."
Dunham said he hopes other observers of the lunar strike will contact him, but apparently only a few saw it.
Web surfers can also check out video replays and audio tracks of the meteor shower at NASAs
NASA scientists and amateur radio enthusiasts at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama launched a helium balloon early Thursday morning. The payload included a video camera and a very low frequency radio transmitter.
Lightning strikes within about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) were picked by the VLF radio and relayed to the ground. Researchers also sought to pick up natural audio emissions from the meteors.
"We had some pretty interesting sounds come out of it," said NASA astronomer Dr. John Horack. "It just shows how often the Earth is raked by lightning."
Researchers at Marshall are matching the meteors shown on video from the balloon to the audio track to determine if any sounds emanated from the astral visitors.
The balloon reached about 90,000 feet (27,432 meters). Thursday morning and landed near Fairmount, Georgia. in the northwest part of the state, said Ed Myszka, who built the payload.
"From the engineering and planning perspective, everything went well," he said. "[But] if [there were] a ton of meteors, that would have been great."
A Ham radio operator who had been tracking the balloons flight recovered the payload intact, within an hour of touchdown, Myszka said.
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