Fire in the SkyS


Fireball 5

Mysterious lights in the sky over New Zealand probably meteors, experts say

Piers Fuller
stuff.co.nz
Thu, 05 Jul 2018 15:38 UTC
Meteor seen entering atmosphere seen from ISS
© Supplied
A group of early morning exercisers were perplexed by strange lights cutting across the Wellington sky on Wednesday morning.

Experts suspect the lights, which were also seen in other parts of the country, were probably meteors flaming out in the upper atmosphere.

Melissa Mebus of Houghton Bay was one of seven women exercising at a regular bootcamp on Houghton Valley School's playing fields around 6.30am when they spotted a strange object overhead.

Richard Hall of the Phoenix Astronomical Society suspects mysterious lights may have been part of a meteor shower.

"Someone said 'oh my good look at that' and we all were all sort of like 'what the heck is that?'"

"We had long enough to see it. It didn't just shoot past ... we had about five seconds which is quite a lot if you are looking at something," Mebus said.
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Fireball 3

Meteor fireball blazes over Guangdong, southeastern China


Sott.net
Fri, 06 Jul 2018 08:59 UTC
meteor china july 2018
A super-bright meteor fireball event occurred over Guangdong, southeastern China on July 3, 2018, at around 00:50 local time.

According to EXOSS Citizen Science Project, the meteor had comparable brightness to the moon and lasted for a duration of 5 seconds. A camera from a sky-monitoring network registered the event, although the view of the middle part was covered by low cloud and the last part was blocked by a building.

The event comes just one month after another very bright fireball exploded over the Chinese city of Jinghong in Yunnan Province.
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Meteor

Two 'hot stones' fall from the sky in Uttar Pradesh, India


Times Now News
Fri, 29 Jun 2018 15:37 UTC
Meteroite
© BCCLRepresentative Image
Two hot "stones" have fallen from the sky in Uttar Pradesh's village of Kasoli. The meteorite-like objects will be examined by a team and will identify the nature of the unearthly object. But is this the first time this has ever happened in India?

Time and again, humans have encountered tales about aliens, their world and a different universe that exist outside the proximity of Earth. And the unearthly objects have always fascinated the intrigue of a person. That intrigue was poked again on Friday when two hot "meteorite-looking" embers were found in the village of Kasoli in Uttar Pradesh by the locals.

According to Sub-divisional Magistrate Kumar Dharmendra, the hot stones fell down making a loud sound after a rainfall in the village. Dharmendra said, the stones have been taken into "safe custody" and will be investigated for experts to examine and identify whether they are meteorites.
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Meteor

Asteroid Vesta, with a 13-mile-high mountain now visible to the naked eye

Michael D'Estries
Mother Nature Network
Wed, 20 Jun 2018 12:01 UTC
Asteroid Vesta
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDAVesta, as captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in 2011, features a mountain that rises more than 65,000 feet above the asteroid's south pole.
Look up in nighttime sky anytime between now and July 16, and you just might spy our solar system's brightest asteroid.

Vesta, a 326-mile-wide object residing in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, is about to make its closest approach to Earth in nearly two decades. But don't worry, unlike other close calls with asteroids in recent history, Vesta is in a stable orbit around the sun that will only bring it within 106 million miles of Earth. Nonetheless, this convergence will make it visible to the naked eye, with a magnitude brightness approaching a maximum of 5.3 this week.

Unlike other asteroids, Vesta's internal geology mimics those of terrestrial planets, with a metallic iron-nickel core covered by a surface crust of basaltic rock. In fact, it's this "frozen lava" that gives Vesta its beautiful reflectivity, casting back 43 percent of all light that hits it. (For comparison, our moon only reflects about 12 percent of all light.)
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Comet 2

Stunning daylight fireball explodes with sonic boom over Russia, meteorites possible


The Watchers
Thu, 21 Jun 2018 12:00 UTC
Very bright daylight fireball explodes over Russia, meteorites possible
© YouTube user Apostol875Bright fireball explodes over central Russia on June 21, 2018.
A very bright daylight fireball exploded over western Russia during the early morning hours of June 21, 2018. The event lasted several seconds before the object disintegrated in a bright flash.

The meteor was seen from the cities of Kursk, Lipetsk, Voronezh and Orel. A sonic boom was associated with this event and reported by residents.

Comment: Activity in our skies is certainly heating up - below are the events documented in just the last two weeks or so:

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Fireball

Daytime meteor fireball jets across Toowoomba, Queensland sky

Meghan Harris
The Chronicle
Thu, 21 Jun 2018 09:28 UTC
An unexplained bright light was seen travelling across the sky above Toowoomba earlier this morning.

There may be an innocent explanation for it but it brings forward the age old question - are we alone in the universe?

It is something that divides people all across the world and when unexplained flashes of light or objects are snapped in the sky, the question is again brought to the forefront of people's minds. Most of the time they can be explained, but sometimes they can't.

This morning Nathan Murphy shared a photo he snapped of the puzzling light moving across the sky at 6.30am.
Fireball over Toowoomba, Australia
© Nathan MurphyNathan Murphy captured a bright light in the sky outside his home in Wyreema.
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Fireball 2

Meteor fireball arrives with a boom, lights up sky in New Zealand

Mark Price
Otago DailyTimes
Mon, 18 Jun 2018 14:54 UTC
Fireball - stock image
Stock image
It glowed like a meteor, boomed like a meteor, and therefore - applying the duck test - was probably a meteor.

Social media pages across the Upper Clutha lit up on Monday night with postings of an extraterrestrial object in the sky to the west of Lakes Wanaka and Hawea.

Some said it was green, others that it was blue and many who did not see it heard the boom.

First to post were Dave Tetzlaff and partner Kirsten Mann, from their Lake Hawea vantage point.
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Fireball

'Look, a Foo Fighter!' Meteor fireball lights up rock concert in the Netherlands


RT
Sun, 17 Jun 2018 16:15 UTC
meteor fireball concert
Music fans were given an unexpected surprise when a fiery meteorite gatecrashed a set by the Foo Fighters during a Dutch music festival.

The American rockers were performing at Landgraaf's Pinkpop festival when a fireball streaked across the sky. The celestial ball of light is thought to have been the same phenomenon observed in dozens of reports to the International Meteor Organization (IMO).

The Belgian agency, which documents comet and meteor shower sightings, reported 90 eyewitness cases involving the fireball across Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and France late on June 16.


Comment: In case anyone is alarmed by our title for this item...
Wikipedia

The term foo fighter was used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe various UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific theaters of operations...


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Fireball 2

Bright fireball spotted over Bahia, Brazil

Marcelo Zurita
bramonmeteor.org
Fri, 15 Jun 2018 08:26 UTC
right fireball spotted over Bahia, Brazil on June 15, 2018

Comment: Translated from Portuguese with Google Translate.


A big bolide was seen in the skies of Bahia tonight (June 15). The BRAMON MDE1 / BA Station, run by Alexsandro Mota, recorded the meteoroid's passage through the atmosphere. The video is impressive and shows the meteor cutting across the field of view of the camera.

Check out: The clouds present at the moment, have somewhat disrupted the measurement of its brightness, but we estimate something around -8.

It was previously associated with the June iota Pegasids meteor shower, a minor rain proposed by Greaves in 2012 that has its radiant on the Pegasus Constellation. However, its definitive classification will only be possible if there is a second image that allows us to extract more information about the meteoroid orbit before entering the atmosphere.

Comment: Following the previous years documented increase in fireballs, 2018 seems to be continuing the trend. In just the last month SOTT has recorded the following:

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Fireball 2

Meteorites recovered in Yunnan, China, following spectacular meteor fireball event


China Daily
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 14:30 UTC
People look for chondrites in China
© Dai Zhenhua/For China DailyPeople look for chondrites (inset) in a sugarcane field in Manlun village in Yunnan province on Monday.
A recent test reveals that the chondrites - stony nonmetallic meteorites - that hit Xishuangbanna, Southwest China's Yunnan province, about two weeks ago, are 4.5 billion years old - almost the same age as of the solar system.

The test was conducted by Xu Weibiao, chief scientist of the Purple Mountain Observatory under Chinese Academy of Sciences, after he received through special delivery one of the over 200 meteorites found in Xishuangbanna on June 11.

Under electron microscope, spherical masses can be seen randomly scattered on the surface of the meteorite test sample.

These are chondrule, which cannot be found in rocks on the earth but are unique to the meteorite. The formation of it can be traced back to 4.5 billion years ago when the sun was just a large nebula - a mass of gas and dust, Xu said.

Comment: See also:

Fireball captured blazing across China - Sonic boom reported, possibility of meteorites



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