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Meteor Fireball

uneasy

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May 28, 2003
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I think there are a few fans of the astronomy picture of the day web site.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Today's image is startling (to me anyway). If I didn't have respect for the site, I would wonder if this picture is a hoax.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0310/fireball_burnett_big.jpg

That's an amazing picture of a meteor causing a fireball in the sky. I didn't know they could look like that. It sure does seem obvious that something like this could be causing a large number of "UFO" sitings? It almost has the classic "cigar shape". Combine that with some fog while viewing it out a car window while driving, and I think I might be calling the police myself.
 
Holy Cow! If I saw that thing in the sky I'd be looking on the horizon for the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse.

Was there by any chance a spaceship trailing the meteor with a bunch of people with purple Nikes? Oh, forgot, that was supposed to be a comet.

Cool picture, thanks for pointing it out.

Frink
 
I saw one, not as spectacular as that, during the daytime back in the sixties in Massachusetts. 20 years later, while talking to a coworker who grew up in New Jersey, I discovered that he had seen the same fireball.

They are awesome and quite memorable...
 
I saw one in Rio during plain daylight back in the late 70s that looked a bit like that. It had no smoke trail, but had an inner area that was bright blue/green.

As usual, some people claimed it was a flying saucer...
 
The photo is spectacular no matter what, but I wonder if the fireball looks more ominous in the picture than it did in real-life. If you were there at the scene, perhaps you would have seen the edge of that roof fifty or sixty feet off in the distance, smaller than it looks in the photo, and the bolide also looking smaller.
 
Cool pic. I've seen a few at night, but nothing that big. Last one I saw (and heard) was during one of the Perseid meteor showers a few years ago.
 
The caption says that it could be an airplane contrail reflecting sunlight, since it looked much the same a minute later.
 
I'm ashamed to admit my eyes skipped over that sentence for some reason. The rest of it goes with the meteor theory, but that one clause in that one sentence says probably not. Now that I look, it is at sunset, so I a contrail might make sense.

Hmmm. Sort of like other news reporting of strange events. All kinds of info on what it probably isn't.

I still didn't know meteors could make anything like that during the day, and apparently they can, so it's still interesting to me.
 
Out of curiosity...do these sorts of events result in any sound, perhaps a BOOM! There i no reported sound associated with this event.

Also in South Wales over the past few days we have been having pretty spectacular sunsets lately with plenty of low scattered cloud formations.

Finally, his home at Pencoed is not far from Cardiff International Airport. I live about the same distance in the other direction frm the kids home and we get some low flying craft such as Boeing 737's, the occational 747 (there is a 747 maintainance hanger at the airport). The single ruunway runs roughly N to S. He also lives close to an RAF/DARA maintainance base RAF St Athan, plenty of jet aircraft and the odd Hercules transporter taking off there, that runway roughly runs E to W.

Just some recent, local observations...
 
Usually there is no sound since they are still very high when they break up. As I indicated, the one I saw in Massachusetts was also seen in New Jersey, so it was very high. It was very bright and brief. If I hadn't been looking in that direction I never would have seen it...
 
Bluegill said:
The photo is spectacular no matter what, but I wonder if the fireball looks more ominous in the picture than it did in real-life. If you were there at the scene, perhaps you would have seen the edge of that roof fifty or sixty feet off in the distance, smaller than it looks in the photo, and the bolide also looking smaller.
Click to expand...

Just a point of information - if there was no sound associated with this event, it wasn't a bolide.
 
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...c_space/photooffieryobjectmystifiesscientists

A digital picture of a spectacular and apparently explosive event in the sky fooled a pair of seasoned NASA scientists, has other researchers around the globe mystified, and made a minor celebrity of a teenage photographer.
...
Problem is, it turns out, there was no meteor.
...
A second wider-angle picture, researchers learned, had been taken at the same time as the first photo. The second image, by Julian Heywood of Porthcawl, about 10 miles from Jonathan's location, helped form the contrail hypothesis and ruled out the idea that the first photo might have been fabricated.
...
During the discussion, the APOD scientists changed their caption, saying the picture likely had something to do with a jet contrail, a consensus that most other scientists had reached.
Click to expand...
Jonathan Burnett's photo:
031013_meteor_wales_02.jpg


Julian Heywood's photo:
031013_fireball_heywood_02,0.jpg


I'll buy the contrail theory. You can see the clouds are taking on varied sunset colors. Color of clouds under these conditions vary with altitude & density, along with the position of the sun.
 
I'll never trust that NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day web site again. Moons around Jupiter? Ya, right.

To be fair to them, their caption for the picture had one sentence as a disclaimer saying it probably wasn't a meteor trail. But as in most news items on "strange" things, the rest of the text was about the more exciting theory, meteor trails.

And I missed the disclaimer sentence the first time around. A skeptic's lesson is never learned.
 
Wait. That article says they changed the caption. I must have seen the earlier caption that said it was a meteor trail. So I didn't misread it. I was taken in by NASA scientists. Yeah, that must be it. :)
During the discussion, the APOD scientists changed their caption, saying the picture likely had something to do with a jet contrail, a consensus that most other scientists had reached.
Click to expand...
 
uneasy said:
I'll never trust that NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day web site again. Moons around Jupiter? Ya, right.

To be fair to them, their caption for the picture had one sentence as a disclaimer saying it probably wasn't a meteor trail. But as in most news items on "strange" things, the rest of the text was about the more exciting theory, meteor trails.

And I missed the disclaimer sentence the first time around. A skeptic's lesson is never learned.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was duped, too. Though must admit I didn't read the caption or story.
 
On CNN's moving screen bar, they had said either yesterday or the day before that some meteor or asteroid passed within approximately 50,000 miles of us! :eek: Anyone else hear anything about this?
 
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