Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

Massive Meteorite Found in China

Xinjiang Region
© Wikimedia CommonsAlthough the exact location of the newly found meteorite has not been announced, its general location is the mountainous border region of China's Xinjiang Uyghur province.
As the meteorite specialist for the Beijing Planetarium, Baolin Zhang gets all kinds of unusual reports - like the dramatic (but ultimately specious) tale of a peasant woman who recently found a blue-ice "meteorite" in her yard.

But credible reports of a massive, oddly shaped and colored stone in the remote Altai Mountains of Xinjiang Uygur province (in northwest China) got his attention. So earlier this month he assembled a small team to check it out firsthand. The trek was cold and arduous, involving a rented jeep, borrowed horses, and even a camel to cross rugged terrain and rivers still swollen with snowmelt.

On the afternoon of July 16th, after reaching a mountainous crest 9,500 feet (2,900 m) up Zhang and his team finally spotted their objective: a large dark-brown stone jutting from the ground. It took only moments for him to realize what they'd found. "This is a huge iron meteorite," he exulted as cameras recorded the scene.

Meteor

UK: Fireballs Spotted in the Night Sky?

Fireball
© Newtownabbey TimesSpotted high in the sky above Ballyclare by Trevor McCusker, it's thought this object may be a fireball carrying information on the ancient history of the solar system.

Meteorites, fireballs or maybe something more extra-terrestrial may have been seen in the Ballyclare sky in the past fortnight.

Eagle-eyed Ballyclare man Trevor McCusker sent these pictures in of three strange objects he spotted in the night sky.

On Tuesday, July 5, the photographer spotted what he described as a "red ball" in the sky around 11pm.

He said: "It was like a football, It was going very fast from south west to north east. It had no tail just a round ball of fire."

Then on the following Saturday, July 9, he spotted a dark object in the sky at around 9pm.

"It was a black type colour object in the sky," he said.

Meteor

Bright fireball over Poland

Late evening of July 7th, a bright fireball lit up the sky over southwestern Poland. The meteor has been registered by the Polish Fireball Network (PFN).

The first images obtained by cameras placed in a station in the village of Podgorzyn - operated by Tomasz Krzyzanowski - were very interesting because they showed that the object crossed the greater part of the sky. Recordings of the cameras working in a station in Szamotuly operated by Maciej Reszelski also showed a very bright and long trace at low altitude.
Image
© PFNFireball registered by three PFN's cameras, July 7, 2011

Another camera working as a Fireball Shield in the town of Nysa also registered the object. Due to the noise of the latter camera, it was difficult to determine the exact coordinates of the trace in the sky.

The analysis of the collected material establish that the phenomenon began in the Wroclaw area at an altitude of 88.2 km. After 1.5 seconds, at an altitude of 74 km there was a flash of light of about 1 mag, after which the meteor clearly brightened. Perhaps it was then that a fragmentation of the object occurred.

Comment: According to the Polish Fireball Network, the orbit of the body was similar to the orbit of the Alpha Capricornids (CAP), but due to a calm nature of its changes in brightness, the meteor came from the main belt of planetoids rather than being cometary in nature. The approximate mass of the body was likely only 0.5-1 kg.


Question

US: Strange Lights Seen Over First Coast, Florida

Strange Lights
© First Coast NewsStrange lights seen over First Coast, Michele Casey points out what she saw from Vilano Beach.
Vilano Beach, Florida -- Some strange lights were seen over the First Coast by many of you early this morning.

We had several people call us, and more chime in on our Facebook page about the very bright light that appeared in the sky around 6:15 Monday morning.

Some were worried that it was a plane crashing into the ocean, but the FAA hasn't reported any downed planes, so that's not the issue.

One website, run by the American Meteor Society, said the bright lights were probably a fireball. They define that as an "extra bright meteor."

"At first I thought it was an airplane coming across," said Michele Casey, pointing to the portion of sky where she observed the light.

People

Best of the Web: Hysteria of cosmic proportions! Missouri, US: Cape doctor says he's not leading survivalist group and has been harassed by believers in 'Planet X'

Image
© Fred LynchDr. Byron Glenn at Cape Urgent Care
Dr. Byron Glenn of Cape Girardeau says he wants nothing to do with the people he sees as online crackpots trumpeting a "conspiracy wrapped in an enigma."

He's not alone. The folks at NASA have fruitlessly tried to debunk what they say are wild conspiracies involving Comet Elenin -- a "wimpy" projectile expected to remain more than 20 million miles from Earth.

Glenn said he's been harassed and threatened by doomsday believers of "Planet X," an idea spreading in the blogosphere and in online chat rooms about a brown dwarf star, a low-mass object rapidly approaching the solar system and bent on destroying much of the Earth. He said that believers, apparently followers of Terral L. Croft, or "Terral03" as he is known in anxiety-ridden chat rooms, have shown up at his North Mount Auburn Road family practice demanding answers.

Comment: This article is a good example of how a group of unstable people and their hysterical actions can be used to twist and ridicule valid topics. Yes, comet Elenin isn't Planet X, and the end of the world is not imminent, though the science points out that calamities are highly probable, especially the next Ice Age.

Notice how the seasonal and "heading for the mountains" loonie is being called "out there" and "on the edge," due to him being a "Sept. 11 conspiracist". Although, in this case, the "out there" label is quite justifiable, sweeping generalizations like this influence the minds of others and damage efforts of genuine and reasonable people.

"Earthquakes, volcanoes, rogue tides, mass animal deaths and the whole 9 yards" are indeed happening, and may increase in the nearest future. But there is so much confusion and plain hysteria around the issue, that it plays into the hands of those who have a vested interest in keeping the truth from the rest of us.

Read Elenin, Nibiru, Planet-X - Time for a Sanity Check article for some clarity on this mess.

For further background see:

Cosmic Propaganda Alert! Comet Elenin: Just Passing By - With SOTT Commentary

Comet Elenin is Coming!

Pole Shift in March? Not Likely!

Comet Elenin: Harbinger of What?

Comet Elenin Update!


Meteor

Kenya: Meteor Sighted Before Crashing in Kilimambogo

Image
© UnknownIllustration only
Residents of the towns of Kilimambogo and Tala in Kenya spotted an object in the sky on Saturday. Those who did not see the object, heard it, as it crashed to the ground.

Residents of the nearby towns of Yatta, Kakuzi and Kangundo reported hearing an explosion around 10am, which they said was comparable to a plane crash or bomb explosion.

Eyewitnesses stated that the object was spinning on impact when it landed in a cornfield.

Police and military officers quickly responded to the scene and found an extremely hot object, weighing in at approximately 11 pounds. They eventually took the object for expert analysis.

The object was a smooth black rock, which area officials believe to be a meteor from outer space.

There were no reported injuries from the impact of the extraterrestrial rock.

Meteor

Shoemaker Impact Structure, Western Australia

Shoemaker Impact Structure
© Earth Observatory, NASA

The Shoemaker (formerly Teague) Impact Structure - located in Western Australia in a drainage basin south of the Waldburg Range - presents an other-worldly appearance in this astronaut photograph. The Shoemaker impact site is approximately 30 kilometers (19 miles) in diameter and clearly defined by concentric ring structures formed in sedimentary rocks (brown to dark brown, image center). The rocks were deformed by the impact event approximately 1.63 billion years ago (as reported by the Earth Impact Database). Other age-dating analyses of granitic rocks at the core of the structure call this age into question (Pirajno et al. 2003).

Several saline and ephemeral lakes - Nabberu, Teague, Shoemaker, and numerous smaller ponds - occupy the land surface between the ring structures. Differences in color result from both water depth and from suspended sediments, with some bright salt crusts visible around the edges of smaller ponds (image center). A Landsat 7 view of the Shoemaker structure illustrates the extent of these ephemeral lakes, or playas, in the region.

The Teague Impact Structure was renamed Shoemaker in honor of Dr. Eugene M. Shoemaker (1928-1997), a pioneer in impact crater studies and planetary geology, as well as the founder of the Astrogeology Branch of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Wolf

100 years ago, a meteorite (possibly) vaporized a dog in Egypt

Image
© Unknown
Here's a bizarre milestone. On June 28, 1911, a meteorite fell over the outskirts of Alexandria, Egypt. The meteorite broke into several smaller rocks, one of which may have reduced a dog to a burnt smear.

On that fateful morning a century ago, the Nakhla meteorite broke over the village of Abu Hummus, and 40 of these fragments were recovered for research.

Although the 1.3-billion-year-old rock is famous in astrogeological circles for its Martian origins, the Nakhla rock also has the lurid (and perhaps unearned) reputation as a dog-smusher. Explains The Smithsonian:
W.F. Hume, minister of the Geological Survey of Egypt, began taking eyewitness statements, and two months later published his report, "The First Meteorite Record in Egypt."

One of those statements, from a farmer who claimed to have seen a fragment fall on a dog, gave rise to the popular myth that Nakhla, as the meteorite would be named, was "the dog killing meteorite," an unsubstantiated claim, but the dramatic account is irresistible: "The fearful column which appeared in the sky at Denshal was substantial. The terrific noise it emitted was an explosion which made it erupt several fragments of volcanic materials. These curious fragments, falling to earth, buried themselves into the sand to the depth of about one metre. One of them fell on a dog...leaving it like ashes in a moment."

Sun

Another Coronal Hole Spewing Solar Wind Our Way - Due July 19th

A dark gap in the sun's atmosphere--a "coronal hole"--is spewing solar wind toward Earth. Estimated time of arrival: July 19th. This morning, UV-filtered telescopes onboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Obervatory photographed the opening:
Image
© SDO/AIAA composite of EUV images at three wavelengths: 211 Å, 193 Å, and 171 Å.

Coronal holes are places where the sun's magnetic field opens up and allows hot gas to escape. A million mile-per-hour stream of solar wind flowing from this hole could spark polar geomagnetic storms when it arrives early next week. High-latitude sky watchers should be prepared for auroras.

Sun

Mystery From the Sun: Huge Solar Storm Still Puzzles 11 Years Later

Eleven years ago this week, one of the worst storms on record raged on the sun, churning huge amounts of plasma around the solar surface and spewing massive loads of particles into space and toward Earth.

The July 14, 2000, event, called the Bastille Day Solar Storm, was a turning point for scientists' understanding of weather on the sun.

Image
© NASA/TRACEOne million degree hot solar plasma travels along magnetic loops in the sun's atmosphere during the Bastille Day solar storm of 2000.
"It was one of the most highly observed events of that time," said Phil Chamberlin, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who is a deputy project scientist for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a sun-studying satellite that launched in February 2010. "It led to a lot of the requirements for the solar missions of today, like SDO."