Fire in the Sky

On Anniversary of Tunguska, Meteor Plunges into Indian Ocean, Lighting up Perth sky

David Gear
Perth Now
Sat, 30 Jun 2012 09:50 UTC

This fiery streak in the sky amazed Perth beachgoers at sunset as a suspected meteor plunged into the ocean off the WA coast.

Pip Moir posted this photo she took at Cottesloe Beach to Twitter shortly after 6pm as puzzled onlookers debated what caused the colourful phenomena.

A spokesman for the Bureau of Meteorology said the weather bureau's radar would not pick up a fast moving object like a meteor.

Daniel Jongue, manager at The Naked Fig Cafe, said he noticed ''something on the horizon'' just before sunset. He said the fiery trail took about 20 minutes to dissipate.

''It looked like vapour. It was red, orange and yellow and quite beautiful,'' he said.

Perth Observatory and Astronomy WA could not be reached for comment last night.

Comment: Tunguska, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

Tunguska, the Horns of the Moon and Evolution

Reader Comments

gdpetti · 2012-06-30T15:11:42Z

Silence is Golden

Especially when such a pretty pic leaves one nearly speechless.

Yozilla · 2012-06-30T15:26:43Z

Optical illusion or...

...are there two suns?

Niall · 2012-06-30T15:26:50Z

"A spokesman for the Bureau of Meteorology said the weather bureau's radar would not pick up a fast moving object like a meteor."

BS, meteors and cometary fragments can appear to crawl through the skies. The reason they have no radar data is because they are not allowed to disclose it.

apacheman · 2012-07-01T13:11:11Z

fireballs up from 1.28 to 5.03 per day since 2005

I have been tracking the incidence of reported fireballs over the US for over a year now, since the increase first caught my notice.

Working from the ams.org database, and researching prior reports going back a century, what I found was that the reported fireball incidence has held steady at around 1.2-1.3 per day for a very long time. Beginning in 2006 we see the following pattern:

2005: 1.28
2006: 1.41
2007: 1.61
2008: 1.98
2009: 1.90
2010: 2.59
2011: 4.46

And so far for 2012, as of yesterday: 5.03

Plot those points and the slope is pretty steep.

I am beginning to suspect that the "Mayan" calendar, which is not really Mayan, since they inherited it from the Olmec, who got it from who knows where, is actually a countdown calendar the pinpoints an intersection with the dense stream of cometary fragments that cuased the Younger Dryas period some 12.5K years ago.

My reasoning is that if the impacts that likely killed the megafuana and Clovis culture occurred over a period of time, say months, instead of hours, then it is possible that those people or more properly, the survivors,were able to figure out the orbit, and that orbit was very long.

If you knew that something devasting was going to return may thousands of years later, how do you warn the future?

About the only thing that might possibly stand the test of time would be a calendar system. So if you construct the calendar to end at the begiing of the intersection, there is some small hope that people will be prompted to pay greater attention to things around them and pick up on the warning signs. Small hope, but better than nothing.

For what it is worth, that's my theory.

I hope I'm wrong, but with the fireball incidence rising as fast as it is doing, I'm not so sure I am. I think we are now entering the front of a dense cloud of rocks or comet fragments that will intensify come December.

I think that the increase has a lot to do with the freaky global weather; so much extra energy is being put into the upper and middle layers of the atmosphere and that energy is being expressed in the weather. Not to mention that we are heating the bottom pretty hard ourselves. Combined with extra solar input from higher sunspot activity, the totality seems to predict some very bad weather ahead.

Heads up!

Dragon · 2012-07-01T16:11:18Z

I sure hope you're wrong. But just in case you're not remember, "The meek shal inherit the Earth"; it might not hurt to find a deep cave to hide in.

Dragon · 2012-07-01T16:08:04Z

Re: Two suns

The optical illusion of two suns in the image is caused by internal relflections inside the camera's lens. Among photographers it's called a lens flare.

....And they've all got masks on.

Amerikagulag

So what are these types of clowns fact checking and disinfoing and misinfoing? They call people liars but think there's no truth! Crazy mfs.

Jason

Obviously it is good to have food. The best food though is fresh. Freshly picked produce from your garden and/or greenhouse, fresh fish from your...

Snowleopard

A CEO that is 'reality impaired'. I can handle people that are mobility impaired, eyesight impaired or other physical impairments, but not when...

Spur

Yahoo! -Whew!-, its over-what a relief! /cheers!

FireH20

Fire in the Sky

On Anniversary of Tunguska, Meteor Plunges into Indian Ocean, Lighting up Perth sky

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