Just wanted to put out a few interesting details about Wednesday's crash of a UPS cargo plane (Airbus A300) near Alabama airport at around 5am on Wednesday 14th August 2013 as it approached Birmingham-Shuttlesworth Airport

From this Chicago Tribune story:

There was a big explosion that lit up the sky. It jarred the earth.
[...]

No distress calls were made to the airport tower, according to April Odom, a spokeswoman for Bell.
[...]

"It was quite a large fire and there were two to three explosions after the plane caught fire, after the crash itself," Bell said.
[...]

Pedro Torres, who lives about two blocks from the crash site, saw "a big flash" from the window of his home when the plane went down.

A baseball-sized meteor blasted over the southeastern United States on Monday night, creating a bright streak of light, a sonic boom and a ruckus on Twitter, officials said on Tuesday.

The meteor appeared at 9:18 p.m. EDT over Alabama, traveling at about 76,000 mph. It exploded 25 miles above Woodstock, Alabama, located about 30 miles from Birmingham.

"Objects of this size hit the Earth's atmosphere on a daily basis, but this one happened near Birmingham, which is a fairly decently sized city and lot of people saw it," Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, told Reuters.

Many of the more than 180 eyewitness reports came from people attending a Mumford & Sons concert in Birmingham.

"This one wasn't at 2 in the morning, so a lot of people were out and about," Cooke said.

"I saw what I first thought was a falling star and then it turned bright green," an observer from Anniston, Alabama, posted on the American Meteor Society website.

Over 80 (so far) witnesses reported a large fireball over Alabama last night (9/9) around 8:35 PM local CDT (1:30 on 10/9 UT). The fireball was seen from primarily Alabama and Ohio, but witnesses from Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky also reported seeing the fireball.

We are currently investigating dozen of reports about this event. We will update this page later today with more information.

Here is the current heat map for the event
that shows where the witnesses reported from. Click the image below to review the event map and witness reports for this fireball.

Someone caught the fireball on video at the Mumford & Sons concert at Oak Mountain Amphitheater in Birmingham, AL.

A first meteorite exploded in the sky of Ferrara Italy on September 3 2013. Two days after, this one was filmed by the exact same cameras.


The images were shot at 10:11 pm on September 5, 2013 west of Ferrara, Italy.

What in the world was that?

People tweeting about a green light "falling" from the sky Wednesday don't have the slightest clue.

But according to Geoff Chester, of the U.S. Naval Observatory, the celestial display was a rock, "probably something about the size of a basketball," entering the Earth's atmosphere at a speed in excess of 40 miles per second.

"Friction with the Earth's atmosphere causes the characteristic greenish glow," he says.

The light was seen by people up and down the Eastern Seaboard late Wednesday evening.

Chester says these "fireballs" occur almost daily, but aren't always reported because 70 percent of the planet's surface is covered in water and because most of the world's people reside near coast lines.

Obviously, since this light was visible to the East Coast of the U.S., plenty of people spotted it.

The space rock was about 2 feet in diameter and weighed more than 100 pounds. When it hit the Earth's atmosphere last week, it shone, briefly, 20 times brighter than the moon.

NASA's cameras captured the meteor as it zipped over the Southeast United States on Wednesday. In the video above, you can watch as it comes soaring through the sky and explodes in a flash of light.

The steady orb of light in the left of the frame is the moon.

Italians in the north east are on the hunt for traces of a fireball which raced across the sky in the early hours of Tuesday morning and "unsettled pets".

The ball of fire, thought to be a meteorite, was spotted between 2.30am and 2.45am and accompanied by a loud bang and thunder-like roar, Il Gazzettino reported.

It was spotted by locals across the north east, including people in Venice and Padua. One local resident told Il Gazzettino the event had "unsettled his pets".

Perplexed residents called the fire brigade and police duly went on a hunt for the extraterrestrial, but failed to find any traces of a meteorite.

Moscow - An asteroid about seven meters (23 feet) in diameter whizzed by Earth on Tuesday, only a day after it was discovered, a US-based astronomy group said.

But even if the asteroid, named 2013 RG, had encountered our planet, it would likely have burned up in the atmosphere, as falling celestial bodies less than 10 meters in diameter tend to do.

The meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, in Russia's southern Ural Mountains, in February was estimated to be more than twice as large: 17 to 20 meters in diameter.

Both space rocks are believed to be part of the Apollo group of asteroids, which regularly cross into Earth's orbit. Eleven more "close approaches" are expected this month, said the US-based Minor Planet Center, which announced the newfound asteroid's flyby.

The asteroid was first noticed by Arizona's Mt. Lemmon Observatory and then confirmed by astronomers in New Zealand and Bulgaria. It flew by Earth at a distance of about 220,000 kilometers (140,000 miles) around 10:30 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time.

Witnesses in Russia's Far East were astounded to see a spectacular burning object break up in the sky near Vladivostok. Though bloggers hailed it as a "meteor," scientists are skeptical.

Photos and videos of the object posted online have provoked a debate on Russian social networks, with various ideas offered for what it might be.

"I was sitting in my car. I did not start taking pictures immediately - first I did not pay attention. It was flying soundless," said one Internet user, who posted several photos of the event.

Initial Meteor Sighting Reports

25 August 2013 - Denise Totah, Lubbock, Texas 5:00 a.m.

5 maybe 10 seconds duration, travelling from west to east, my right to left. I was facing west. I thought it was a flash of lightning at first. I turned to look up and saw this big flash of light and it looked like it had 2 contrails at the end. I thought that maybe a plane had exploded, but there was no sound. It was a little brighter than the moon. It looked like 2 trails coming from it after it started disappearing. I didn't get a picture, I just know that the flash was bright enough to make me look up to the sky cause I thought it was lightning.

Thomas Ashcraft - Heliotown - New Mexico writes,

"Did anyone catch a large fireball on Aug 25 2013 at 0954:50 UT in the west Texas- eastern New Mexico vicinity? (0354:50 am MDT / 0454:50 am CDT) I caught a flash behind clouds which might have come from over the horizon in which case this fireball would have been deeper into north central Texas. It should show on space fence radar for Texas observers. It made a 30 second radio reflection at 217 MHz and a two minute reflection on tv forward scatter frequencies."

Sue Davis said...

I saw something go across the sky and catch on fire and slow down to almost a stop as it seemingly entered our atmosphere.. then it shot across sky and seemed to disappear... never seen anything like that. It was witnessed at 1:39 a.m. August 25, 2013 in Brazoria County Texas right outside of the town Angleton.