Fire in the SkyS


Fireball 2

Two overhead meteor explosions over Tennessee, Alabama, 30 October 2012

Adam Henry
waff.com
Tue, 30 Oct 2012 07:24 UTC
Image
This NASA photo shows the outline of a fireball as seen from space; the same meteor spotted in Tennessee Tuesday morning.
Recent booms and flashing lights across the Tennessee Valley have some people wondering what all the ruckus in the sky is.

According to NASA, it's the perfect time of the year for scattered meteor showers.

A fireball was spotted across the sky in Jackson, Tennessee, Tuesday morning; it could be seen from Kentucky, Alabama and even Louisiana, according to Bill Cooke with NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office.

A fireball, also a meteor, is given a separate name because of its brightness. In order to be classified as a fireball, the meteor must be brighter than the planet Venus.

Cooke said this fireball was brighter than the moon.

Comment:
Cooke said it's possible that Jupiter is concentrating the meteors into a group, thus making them more visible from the ground.
NASA needs to sack Cooke and hire a better liar!

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Fireball 2

Eyewitnesses describe 'comet-like' white fireball possibly impacting Southern Ontario, 25 October 2012


lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com
Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:50 UTC
Meteor Sighting Reports:

25 OCT 2012 Ryan Keswick - Ontario, Canada 2140 Eastern
Duration: 2-4 seconds. Facing North, object was seen NW moving NE. Bright yellow, brighter than Venus. Yes, some parts fragmenting behind it. Object was very visible in the sky, even with lights from the town.
25OCT2012 davies - Barrie, Ontario, Canada 21:50:00
Duration: 3 seconds. Facing north. It looked like it fell down to the ground. White colour, no sound, very bright. It looked like it had a long tail of white sparks. It looked very close, like it would have fallen within 20 kms north of Barrie.
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Fireball

Spectacular fireball turns night into day, seen from North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, 26 October 2012


lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com
Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:32 UTC
Image
© Meteoroid Environments Office, EV44, Marshall Space Flight CenterVery bright event at 05:24:38 UTC on October 26 (1:24:38 AM EDT), rivalling Moon. The fireball's final flare was so bright that NASA's al-sky camera lit up like daytime.
NASA Report by Dr. Bill Cooke:
Very bright event at 05:24:38 UTC on October 26 (1:24:38 AM EDT), rivalling Moon. Flash seen by our cameras even through dense clouds

Trajectory analysis indicates this could be a South Taurid (a bit on the fast side). Details are:

Speed: 36.0 +/- 2 km/s
Radiant coordinates: 44.0 +/- 2 deg RA, 17.0 +/- 0.5 deg Dec
Start location: 83.872 W, +34.517 at an altitude of 102.9 km
*End location: 83.940 W, +34.599 at an altitude of 72.9 km

End location is the last point we could determine before the flare got so huge it was impossible to determine the center of light. The meteor lasted several frames beyond this.

Probably too fast and too high to produce meteorites, but I will wait to see if there is a doppler signature.

Regards,

Bill Cooke
Meteoroid Environments Office
EV44, Marshall Space Flight Center
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Fireball 3

Photographer captures blazing meteor over Arizona, 21 October 2012


The Friday Flyer
Fri, 26 Oct 2012 16:49 UTC
dennis bickers
© Dennis Bickers
The 2012 Orionid meteor shower peaked early Sunday, October 21, with forecasters predicting up to 25 meteors an hour for patient stargazers. Canyon Lake photographer Dennis Bickers wasn't exactly trying to be a stargazer but he believes he got a good shot of a large meteor passing across the western sky just after sunset Sunday.

Asked whether it could have been the setting sun shining on a jet contrail, Dennis says he would have known the difference - the meteor was traveling too fast to be a jet.

The next major meteor shower to light up the night sky will be the annual Leonid meteor shower in mid-November. It will peak on November 17.

To see or purchase Dennis Bickers' pictures of Canyon Lake, visit gobickers.com.
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Fireball 5

Nevermind the disinformation: 'Rock' found in Navato, California IS a meteorite, Second one found nearby

David Perlman
San Francisco Chronicle
Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:39 UTC
Image
© P. Jenniskens SETI Institute/NASA ARC The dent in a roof caused by a meteorite from the Oct. 17, 2012, fireball over Northern California is identified by Luis Rivera, the neighbor of Lisa Webber who found the meteorite after it struck her Novata, Calif., home.
And now there are two.

Two meteorites, that is, because the "rock" that fell on Lisa Webber's roof in Novato from last week's explosive fireball in the sky turns out to be a true meteorite after all.

Peter Jenniskens, the meteor scientist at the Seti Institute in Mountain View, said he first dismissed the one that hit Webber's house because its surface looked merely like a weathered chunk of granite and its outside wasn't black like most meteorites.

But he changed his mind, he said, because a chip from a second "rock" showed tiny specks of what looked like metal under his microscope - telltale signs of the violent collisions that typical meteors endure as they form in the asteroid belt and fall to Earth.

Now, a Sacramento man has reported finding the second meteorite in the Novato area on Monday.

Brien Cook, an amateur meteorite hunter, told The Chronicle he too had dismissed his "rock" at first. He said he stuck it in his pocket and threw it in his waste bucket at home.
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Fireball

'Largest meteorite' to fall in Poland discovered


TheNews, Poland
Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:56 UTC
Meteorite Crater
© WikipediaA meteorite crater at the Poznan reserve.
The largest meteorite to have fallen in Poland has been discovered on the outskirts of the western city of Poznan.

Professor Wojciech Stankowski, a retired lecturer at Poznan's University of Adam Mickiewicz told the PAP news agency:

"At the beginning of this month, a meteorite of about 300 kg was found," he said.

"It is by far the largest to have been found in this part of Europe up until now," he added.

The marvel from outer space was found in the Morasko Meteorite Nature Reserve, which was established in 1976 at a site where meteorites were first discovered in 1914.

The most recent discovery was made by Magdalena Skirzewska and Lukasz Smula, two geologists from the Silesian city of Opole.

Until now, the largest meteorite discovered on Polish soil - also at Morasko Meteorite Nature Reserve - weighed 164 kg, located in 2006.

The latest find is almost twice as heavy. Nevertheless, the world's largest known meteorite - the so-called Hoba of Namibia - weighs in at over 60 tonnes.
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Play

Meteor sonic boom captured over Bonney Lake, Washington

Rich Everton
Youtube
Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:57 UTC
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)

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Fireball 2

Meteorite hunters are scouring the Bay Area looking for chunks of space debris

Laura Anthony
KGO-TV.com
Thu, 18 Oct 2012 09:19 UTC
Meteorite hunters are scouring the Bay Area looking for chunks of space debris. They can be sold for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars at auction.

Bob Verish is looking for pieces of meteorite in Mill Valley that would be from the meteor that blazed across Bay Area skies Thursday night. Verish drove from Battle Mountain, Nevada Thursday morning. According to his calculations, the debris from last night's car-sized meteor likely landed somewhere between Mill Valley and points north and west. "The reflection from the stones that fell seem to start here in the Mill Valley area. It definitely was flying low and dropping rocks along a path, maybe even 50 miles north of here," said Verish.

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Fireball 4

2-inch rock that hit a Novato home is a chunk of the meteor that lit up the Northern California skies


KGO-TV.com
Mon, 22 Oct 2012 08:56 UTC
NASA scientists have recovered the first chunk of the spectacular meteor seen streaking across the Bay Area sky Wednesday night. It apparently hit the roof of a house in Novato, bounced a couple of times and ended up on the ground. The homeowner says she heard a loud thud that night. Lisa Webber says she remembers because the house was quiet, she had just turned off the TV after the Giants game was in a rain delay.

She found the meteor fragment in her backyard a couple days later. Webber contacted scientists with the SETI Institute in Mountain View who have confirmed the piece of rock is indeed a small chunk of the meteor.
Image
© KGO photo
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Fireball 2

Now it's New Jersey: What was the mysterious shake rattling New Jersey? Residents feel the earth move...but it's not an earthquake

Nina Golgowski
Daily Mail
Sat, 20 Oct 2012 09:58 UTC
Image
© USGS
A mysterious ground shake through parts of southern New Jersey rattled residents around 11am this morning leaving bewildered residents still without answers. Both the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Weather Service reported no earthquake having occurred in the area and the nearby military base claiming to have had no training exercises that would have caused the tremors.

The USGS has since speculated that the shake felt by residents in southern counties for an estimated 15 seconds was from a sonic boom. The effect would be a 'thunder-like noise a person on the ground hears when an aircraft or other type of aerospace vehicle files overhead faster than the speed of sound or supersonic,' according to NASA.

Comment:

So if there was no earthquake, what caused the sonic boom? Elsewhere on the Big Blue Marble there have been almost daily reports of loud booms as well as 'earthquakes' and meteorite explosions:

Thousands report loud boom and unusual sounds in Northeastern US: USGS classifies it as earthquake, but was it really an overhead meteor explosion?

Meteor explodes above Devon, England, blast wave blows open police station doors, tremors felt across wide area

Fragmentation and Sonics! Northern California Fireball Meteor +19'42 PDT 17OCT2012 - Unrelated to the Orionids

Slow-moving blue-orange fireball reported over Lincolnshire, England

Meteor with a long gold tail blazes across Alberta, Canada, 15 October 2012

Large bright fireball with orange-green tail breaks apart over Queensland, Australia, 29 August 2012

Something wicked this way comes? Read our SOTT Focus: Meteorite Impacts Earth in Minden, Louisiana - Media and Government Cover It Up

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