Rich Everton
Youtube
Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:57 CDT
I was outside walking my dog (Bonney Lake, Wa) Thursday evening 10-18-2012 when at approximatly 7:45 PM Pacific Time the cloud covered night sky flashed so brightly that it blinded me breifly. Aproximatly 20 seconds later there was a large continuous boom as you will hear in the video! The weather in the Seattle where I live was unsettled that night but in my location the was no lightning or thunderstorm prior or after the event. The loud roar was unlike any thunder I have ever heard. Here is video of one of my security cameras capturing the event. (The time showing on my security screen is actually
1:30 minutes slow)
When an extremely large meteor passed very low over East Kent in 2004 at night. It was like a continuously rolling thunder which rattled the windows until I thought they were going to break.
This meteor is actually a very large asteroid and fortunately it did not come down this time around. While you can find illustrations of asteroids passing through the Earth's atmosphere on the web which are in fact quite close to the actual appearance, the big difference is that in the illustrations the plasma (flame) flow is shown as streamlined around the head. In reality the plasma flow around the head of a large asteroid is anything but with the flame whipping around the front of the head before settling down into a streamlined flow behind. This creates a large amount of flicker of the light on the ground, in this case almost to a blood-red and orange daylight for the time of its presence.
On the basis of a previous sighting in 1985 I put the size of this object in the region of 1.5 to 8 miles in diameter.
It is coming down to stay within a few years or perhaps decades. I often visit SOTT as they pick out many of the best/biggest sightings although amateur descriptions are often misleading. Be on the look out for a black headed meteor rimmed with ruddy orange flame.