Heard my first meteor this morning

Travis

Misanthrope of the Mountains
Travis
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Mar 31, 2007
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About 8:30AM out of a clear blue sky came a boom unlike anything I had ever heard. It shook the house, knocking pictures out of alignment, scared my pets and damn near had me crapping myself. It was so sharp and violent I was sure that someone had just run a car into my house or something.

Only that wasn't it. It had startled the entire town out of a lazy Sunday morning setting off car alarms and sending dogs howling out of fear.

Turns out it was a meteor detonating high in the atmosphere with exceptional violence.

Wow. I guess I can tick that off the bucket list.
 
Travis said:
Turns out it was a meteor detonating high in the atmosphere with exceptional violence.
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That just what the government wants you to believe. who benefits? follow the money. Chase the monkey. The truth is out there.
:boxedin:






In all seriousness that's pretty cool. It's only a matter of time until a meteor blows up a city, glad it wasn't today!
 
Wow, awesome. Sounds to me like you had exploding head syndrome which led to a manifestation of your psychic energies.
 
I wish I could hear/see a fireball. all I have seen are a few streaks in the sky.
O/P, your decription sort of sounds like a small, shallow quake. I know it wasn't a quake, but I was kind of surprised by the similarity.
 
Seriously though I've seen a lot of falling debris but never had heard a sonic boom or sound of any kind associated with them, I'd feel very fortunate to witness such rare phenomena.
 
What struck me about it was the incredible sharpness of it. Like some insanely huge sledge hammer struck the house.

BANG!

And then it is gone.

Naturally I ran outside to see if I could see a rising mushroom cloud from what I assumed was a Mythbusters experiment gone terribly wrong but couldn't see anything. Apparently the actual fireball was to the north of me below the horizon.

It was pretty darn cool in retrospect but terribly frightening at the time.
 
I once heard and saw a lesser version of your experience a couple of years ago.
Yes, the sound was unique.
And scary. Very, very scary.
 
Well they showed a picture of the fireball on Good Morning America.

Not too shabby.
 
Here's a bit of misinformation typical of the news media that can't bother to ask any experts proper questions. It's highly unlikely this meteor was from the Lyrids shower which is comet tail dust and doesn't typically contain anything larger than dust specs.

A can't find any specific official reports yet or videos of the fireball.
 
Here's one on http://www.spaceweather.com/ that I'll quote because it will scroll off the page by tomorrow or the next day.
SIERRA FIREBALL DECODED: On Sunday morning, April 22nd, just as the Lyrid meteor shower was dying down, a spectacular fireball exploded over California's Sierra Nevada mountain range. The loud explosion rattled homes from central California to Reno, Nevada, and beyond. According to Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Envronment Office, the source of the blast was a meteoroid about the size of a minivan.

"Elizabeth Silber at Western University has searched for infrasound signals from the explosion," says Cooke. "Infrasound is very low frequency sound which can travel great distances. There were strong signals at 2 stations, enabling a triangulation of the energy source at 37.6N, 120.5W. This is marked by a yellow flag in the map below."

[Go to the link for the map]

"The energy is estimated at a whopping 3.8 kilotons of TNT (about one fourth the energy of the 'Little Boy' bomb dropped on Hiroshima), so this was a big event," he continues. "I am not saying there was a 3.8 kiloton explosion on the ground in California. I am saying that the meteor possessed this amount of energy before it broke apart in the atmosphere. [The map] shows the location of the atmospheric breakup, not impact with the ground."

"The fact that sonic booms were heard indicates that this meteor penetrated very low in atmosphere, which implies a speed less than 15 km/s (33,500 mph). Assuming this value for the speed, I get a mass for the meteor of around 70 metric tons. Hazarding a further guess at the density of 3 grams per cubic centimeter (solid rock), I calculate a size of about 3-4 meters, or about the size of a minivan."

"This meteor was probably not a Lyrid; without a trajectory, I cannot rule out a Lyrid origin, but I think it likely that it was a background or sporadic meteor."
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This sounds like it was pretty big. I wonder if anyone got it in a telescope before it slammed into our atmosphere.
 
Oh and if their triangulation is correct then this thing was actually pretty darn close to me. In fact it was darn near exactly over my mom's house.
 
Meteorite hunters in the 19th Century looking for the remnants of one in the area where Bigfoot lives never mentioned encountering any.
 
Travis said:
Oh and if their triangulation is correct then this thing was actually pretty darn close to me. In fact it was darn near exactly over my mom's house.
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Hearing the sonic boom as loud as you did indicates it wasn't too far away (from a few to quite a few miles, close by meteorite standards). People who hear a wooshing sound before the boom are even closer but I haven't seen any of those accounts yet.

Typically when the meteor breaks up it then falls to Earth at terminal velocity but there is still some forward momentum. The pieces end up in an elliptical strewn field with the larger pieces falling out sooner and smaller ones going further. If I lived near you I'd be planning a meteorite hunt but they aren't easy things to find. A metal detector helps and a lot of patience and terrain that can more easily be searched than not.

When they fall over populated areas people tend to find them, even hear them hit their houses. That has happened in New Zealand (Auckland I believe) and a Chicago suburb in events I recall.
 
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Oh I'm sure there will be meteorite hunters aplenty combing the countryside. I just called my mom and she says she heard it real loud too.

Funnily enough she didn't think much of it at the time as she just assumed it was the Mythbusters team blowing something up again. You see the Mythbusters have rattled my mom's house quite a few times with their bigger explosions.
 
Gosh you live in a teeny town. What do you do there, if you don't mind my asking? The terrain is not conducive to finding meteorites, BTW. Too bad. I'd still go hunting, myself, but them I'm an incurable treasure hunter.

Of course if someone ids the strewn field it makes it easier to look.
 
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MattTheTubaGuy said:
I wish I could hear/see a fireball. all I have seen are a few streaks in the sky.
O/P, your decription sort of sounds like a small, shallow quake. I know it wasn't a quake, but I was kind of surprised by the similarity.
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I've never heard one. I have seen two meteors that were large enough to be visible in early twilight. One about a year ago was spectacular, with bright, multi-colored flames.
 
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