* Astronomy

The Moore County meteorite (Figures 1a,b,c) fell at 5:00 PM on April 21, 1913, on the farm of George C. Graves, located approximately three miles east of Carthage, Moore County, North Carolina (79° 23'W, 35° 25'N) (Henderson and Davis, 1936). A loud "rumbling and zooming" noise "with no distinct explosions" was first observed within a five or six mile radius of the fall, followed by a sighting of a red hot ball with a 15-foot trail of blue-black smoke; the meteorite itself landed within a few feet of a farmer, in a nearly-vertical (but slightly SW-sloping) hole in a freshly-ploughed field (Henderson and Davis, 1936). Only one stone was recovered (Figure 1b), weighing approximately 1.88 kg, with maximum dimensions approximately 15 cm x 10.5 cm x 8 cm (Henderson and Davis, 1936). This stone was divided between the US National Museum (Smithsonian) in Washington, D.C., and the North Carolina State Museum in Raleigh, now the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (Henderson and Davis, 1936), where the main fractions of the stone are still kept (0.9 kg at the USNM and ~0.56 kg at the NC Museum: Grady, 2000; Tacker, pers. comm.). 
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