from The Practical Astronomer, 1856

(page 335)

I cannot here omit to mention a very unusual phenomenon that I observed about ten years ago in my darkened room. The window looked toward the west, and the spire of Chichester Cathedral was before it at the distance of 50 or 60 yards. I used very often to divert myself by observing the pleasant manner in which the sun passed behind the spire, and was eclipsed by it for some time; for the image of the sun and of the spire were very large, being made by a lens of 12 feet focal distance; and once, as I observed the occultation of the sun behind the spire, just as the disk disappeared, I saw several small, bright, round bodies or balls running towards the sun from the dark part of the room, even to the distance of 20 inches. I observed their motion was a little irregular, but rectilinear, and seemed accelerated as they approached the Sun. These luminous globules appeared also on the other side of the spire, and preceded the sun, running out into the dark room, sometimes more, sometimes less, together, in the same manner as they followed the sun at its occultation. They appeared to be, in general, one-twentieth of an inch in diameter, and therefore must be very large, luminous globes in some part of the heavens, whose light was extinguished by that of the sun, so that they appeared not in open daylight; but whether of the meteor kind, or what sort of bodies they might be, I could not conjecture."

Professor Hansteen mentions that, when employed in measuring the zenith distances of the polar star, he observed a somewhat similar phenomenon, which he describes as "a luminous body which passed over the field of the universal telescope; that its motion was neither perfectly equal nor rectilinear, but resembled very much the unequal and somewhat serpentine motion of an ascending rocket;" and he concluded that it must have been " a meteor" or "shooting star" descending from the higher regions of the atmosphere.