Scott Gilbert is – by day – a mild-mannered, cautious-sounding consultant for the Investors Group.

Come nightfall, he and the rest of the York Simcoe Amateur Astronomers gather on a farm and aim their pupils into the velvet blackness, seeking planets, constellations and meteors.

This weekend, however, Gilbert, 67, the group's president, will gather as many of his loyal members as he can and, for the first time, look downward – at this plebeian, pedestrian planet – and scour the farmland, muck and swamp of rural Newmarket.

The reason: On Sunday, March 15, at 8:37 p.m., for four seconds, a fireball roared through the blackness; five automated cameras caught what an expert figures are fragments tumbling down to Earth, into Ontario horse country.

"Our normal observing site is out off the York-Durham line, which is sort of the eastern boundary of where they think this thing may have landed," Gilbert said. "I want to find out what area they're concentrating on or how big an area they're going to look at, and just see if we can get some of the members out."

He has never looked for meteorites before and experts suspect the largest piece anyone can expect to find is a fist-sized chunk; that, or several smaller pieces.

Gilbert is skeptical, reserved in the face of the opportunity such an event provides a relatively small amateur astronomy club and its 35 to 40 members. He figures he can rope four or five.

"Let's be honest, it is a huge territory and there's a lot of swamp and stuff. It could have come down in the bog ... you're not going to find anything there," Gilbert said, half-laughing, half-sighing.

"You could have 10,000 people walking up and down that area and you wouldn't find a thing."

To make the quest – which he likens to the classic needle in the haystack – even more unlikely is that "a lot of it's open farmland and they're starting to plow."

But, he added: "We might get lucky."

The meteor, or shooting star, was caught by five cameras in southern Ontario, said Kim Tait, associate curator of mineralogy at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Black-and-white videotapes show a bright, four-second streak that peters out at the end.

"We've spent a lot of time calculating where we think it fell," Tait said yesterday. "The more eyes we have on the ground the better."

"We'd like to hear from anybody who saw it," said Phil McCausland, head of the network of astronomical cameras, operated by the Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration at the University of Western Ontario, that captured the meteor.

"The colour (of a flying meteor) can range from brilliant and emerald greens to, more commonly, yellows or reds," McCausland said.

Eyewitnesses could add detail to the videotape record and help pinpoint where any debris landed, he said.

Witnesses and meteorite finders can call Tait at 416-586-5820.

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To help increase the slim chances of spotting the meteorite material over the wide possible swath between Newmarket and Lake Simcoe, Tait is to hold a public information session in Newmarket on Monday.

She will be in the main room of the Public Library, near Main St. and Davis Dr., between 1p.m. and 4p.m., with meteorites from the ROM collection that people can see and touch. Similar space rocks can be seen on the museum's second floor.

Last month's meteor was similar to two others over southern Ontario a year ago, McCausland said. One is thought to have crashed into Georgian Bay, the other into fields north of Guelph.

Last November, a spectacular meteor over Buzzard Coulee at the Alberta-Saskatchewan border deposited thousands of kilograms of fragments that are still being collected.

"Meteorites that fall to the ground are the only hard information we have from our solar system," Tait said. "They are small jigsaw-puzzle pieces waiting to be analyzed and every little bit counts."

Graham Wilson, a geological consultant with a 30-year interest in meteorites who catalogues them for the ROM, elaborated: "The evidence obtained from meteorites can be quite extraordinary. It includes evidence of the formation of the chemical elements, which in part occurred in very large stars before our solar system was even formed, which is to say, more than 4.567 billion years ago."

Wilson points out that usually only 1 to 2 per cent of a meteor survives its descent to Earth, unless it happens to be round, in which case it can be upwards of one-third.

"I would volunteer to help (find it), but as it happens, I was looking at a potential meteorite today, which came to me from another province. Unfortunately ... it seems to be a terrestrial basalt rather than a rock from space," he said, chuckling.



Colour: Black – sometimes shiny, sometimes matte.

Special Property: Nine out of 10 meteorites are magnetic. Test with a good magnet.

John Goddard