Fire in the SkyS


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NASA Spies Lunar Meteoroid Impact

Huntsville, AL - There's a new crater on the Moon. It's about 14 meters wide, 3 meters deep and precisely one month, eleven days old - and NASA astronomers watched it form. "A meteoroid hit the Moon's Sea of Clouds (Mare Nubium) with 17 billion joules of kinetic energy - that's about the same as 4 tons of TNT," said Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center.

"The impact created a bright fireball, which we video-recorded using a 10-inch telescope."

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Record meteorite hits Norway - Impact blast comparable to Hiroshima

At around 2:05 a.m. on Wednesday, residents of the northern part of Troms and the western areas of Finnmark could clearly see a ball of fire taking several seconds to travel across the sky.

A few minutes later an impact could be heard and geophysics and seismology research foundation NORSAR registered a powerful sound and seismic disturbances at 02:13.25 a.m. at their station in Karasjok.

Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.

"I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash.

"I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said.

Astronomers were excited by the news.

Comment: Comment: Gosh, what a surprise! For more information on comets, meteors, and NEOs, check out:

- The Signs Meteor Supplement

- Independence Day by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

- Cometary Showers, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

The Norway strike is especially interesting not only because of its sheer magnitude, but because it seems to have been a busy week for meteorites and fireballs...


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South Africa- Meteorite crashes through windscreen of car

Driver Rick Wirth's escape when a stone crashed through his screen on a road in Minneapolis left him thanking his lucky stars.

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UFO 'probably a small meteorite or something'

The search for an unidentified object that apparently crashed into the sea at Port Shepstone on Saturday will resume at the weekend as there were no bodies to search for, the National Sea Rescue Institute said on Tuesday.

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Daytime Meteor Spotted In Colorado

Steve Erickson and his boys have a pretty good view of the night sky. Tuesday, the daytime sky was pretty impressive, too.

As Erickson and his boys Colton, 11, and Cal, 9, were driving back to their home at Horse Mountain Ranch north of Wolcott Tuesday afternoon, they saw something - presumably a meteor - streak across the western sky.

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Nah. It couldn't have been a meteorite. Could it?

BURNABY - A loud explosion in Burnaby late last night has authorities scratching their heads.

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Astronomer: "UFO" observed across Thailand is meteor

The recent sighting of what appears to be an unidentified flying object (UFO) over Thai central province of Ayutthaya has left witnesses scratching their heads over what exactly it might have been while some astronomer and experts thought it was something like a meteor.

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Meteorite falls in Northeast Brazil

In TABOACAL at SANTO ANTONIO DE JESUS rural area, PAULINA DE JESUS saw a huge fire ball crossing the sky. "After falling, the fire ascended about 30m into the sky" and burned a great forest area in the Atlantic Forest.

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Meteor lights Alberta sky

Calgarians awoke to a fire in the sky early Wednesday morning.

Alan Hildebrand, co-ordinator of the Canadian Fireball Reporting Centre, said 20 people reported seeing a fireball, an exceptionally bright meteor, streak across the sky just before 7 a.m., lasting for several seconds before breaking up into fragments.

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(Yet another) Meteor lights up the morning skies

BOISEE -- It happened early Thursday morning around 7:15 a.m.

Jacqueline Correnti describes what she the bright meteor she saw in the morning sky.

A very bright meteor lit up the skies and streaked across the horizon.

NewsChannel 7 spoke with several of the people who witnessed it.

We had numerous calls here at the station from people who saw it.

Police dispatch also took several calls, and even one person in the Boise Airport tower saw it.

And though the eyewitness accounts vary slightly, they are all consistent with it being a meteor.

Comment: A post from our Forum:

Im currently living in a town in Essex, Uk...

Last night on 11th January 2006 at roughly 19:10hours I witnessed a decending meteroic phenomena which, if I were to hazard a guess, was a small meteor breaking up to the NE of my position.

Id guess [it was]no more than 3-6miles from my postion as the view I had was clear enough to see a glitering trail of sparks and colour decending with it, although there was no impact sound, I didn't really expect any. It was in my view for around 1.5-3seconds, so I hadn't seen it decend from a great distance and my view was obscured quickly by other houses.

To date in the last - maybe - year or more of watching the skies, this is the sixth or so time I've seen this same type of meteoric phenomena. I think we've been lucky so far as I have yet to have heard any impact. To be quite honest the first 2-3 times I have witnessed this it really sent a chill down my spine as one of these phenomena occured in a horizontal position across a small valley on which I live on the high side, and I knew that whatever it was could have been no more than 200-300feet above my head as it was traveling between the land and the thick cloud cover overhead.

I have had my attetion drawn to the skies so many times now and seen so many unexplainable occurences and strange celestial events, I thought I'd start sharing them as and when they occur in future. Ourselves in the future have helped me so much already in understanding what's going on, I felt its time to try and help share the high strangeness I see going on in the world around my locality.

Keep the hard hats handy.