Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

US: That unidentified flaming object in Northland skies? It was a fireball, experts say

That object seen in the skies over the Northland last Saturday afternoon was a meteor bright enough to be seen during the day, according to the website of the American Meteor Society. The term for that is a daylight fireball.

It was a fireball.

That object seen in the skies over the Northland last Saturday afternoon was a meteor bright enough to be seen during the day, according to the website of the American Meteor Society. The term for that is a daylight fireball.

After Saturday's Eh? column reported someone seeing a "large object with flames coming from the back of it" over Lake County about 5:20 p.m. Aug. 27, several readers called and e-mailed with their observations.

Rita O'Connell said she and her mother, Millicent O'Connell, saw it about 5:23 p.m. when they were at the Moose Lake exit on Interstate 35. "In the sky high in front of us, about due north, we saw a flaming object falling at about an 80 degree angle from high left to lower right," she wrote.

Meteor

Search for meteorite in west of Ireland

Image
© UnknownA meteor is seen in the sky above Spain last year
An appeal has been launched for help in locating a meteorite after a fireball was seen blazing across Irish skies last week.

An appeal has been launched for help in locating a meteorite that fell on Ireland.

Astronomy Ireland says it has received reports from around the country of a fireball seen blazing across the sky last week. The fireball was caused as fragments of a comet entered the Earth's atmosphere over Ireland on the night of Monday 22 August.

While most meteors are around the size of a grain of sand - fireballs such as the one seen last week are caused by larger objects hitting the Earth's atmosphere at speeds of around 100,000mph.

It is thought pieces of the meteorite may have survived the fall to the ground and landed in the west.

Meteor

India: Delhi boys discover asteroid

Vaibhav Sapra and Sharanjeet Singh of Bal Bharati Public School, Pitampura, have discovered a Main Belt Asteroid, ensuring for themselves a name in history.

Conducted by non-government organisation Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) in collaboration with the United States-based International Astronomical Search Collaboration, the All-India Asteroid Search Campaign-2011 concluded in August. It involved school and college students from across the country working with a special software to discover asteroids. The students, divided into groups of two each, collaborated and analysed their data for asteroid hunting. It was a difficult and challenging task for Vaibhav and Sharanjeet, both Science students, to jointly detect the asteroid from a series of pictures of the sky.

Meteor

Wales, UK: Cardiff student discovers two new asteroids

Hannah Blyth
© WalesOnlineHannah Blyth: Helped discover asteroids on work experience
A stargazing schoolgirl made quite an impact on work experience when she discovered 22 new asteroids and a disintegrating comet.

Hannah Blyth, 18, had been chosen to do a summer work placement on the University of Glamorgan's Faulkes Telescope project when she made the remarkable finds.

The St John's College pupil single-handedly discovered two new asteroids, and together with astronomer Nick Howes and two of the world's leading comet and asteroid imagers, Giovanni Sostero and Ernesto Guido, discovered 20 others - not to mention the comet.

"I was not really expecting to be involved with the asteroids, never mind expecting to find new ones - and it was quite a rush, to tell the truth," said Hannah, from Castleton, who is hoping for a career in science.

"It was an extremely exciting moment when we discovered the asteroids, and something to remember. I'm very proud of the fact that I was part of something like that, I had a lot of fun."

Meteor

US: 'Too Bright' Meteor Streaks Over Atlanta Skies

A very bright meteor streaked across the skies of Atlanta Sunday night, NASA scientists revealed Monday.

NASA said that the meteor was "too bright for the all-sky camera in Cartersville to accurately determine the center of light."

The Meteoroid Environment Office reported the meteor's initial speed was around 23.6 km per second (52,800 mph).

The all-sky camera in Cartersville, Georgia, operated by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., captured a video and photos of the spectacular meteor.

Meteor_1
© NASA/MSFC/Meteoroid Environment OfficeView of meteor from all sky camera located at Cartersville, Georgia.

Question

China: Huge Bubble Cloud over Beijing Skies Mystifies Observers

Photos were posted online of a mysteriously huge bubble cloud over the skies of Beijing and surrounding areas Thursday, which raised concerns and discussions among netizens.


"At first, it's relatively small and bright, the upper part is something like a semi-circle, a spherical ring of light, it's obviously becoming bigger and bigger then."

When the observation team set their instruments at the bubble, it gradually became bigger and thinner. The entire occurrence lasted for less than 15 minutes. Observers took pictures of the whole process and posted them online.

Meteor

Comet Elenin Could Be Disintegrating

Elenin
© Michael MattiazzoC/2010 X1 Elenin, on Aug 29, 2011.
Astronomers monitoring Comet Elenin have noticed the comet has decreased in brightness the past week, and the coma is now elongating and diffusing. Some astronomers predict the comet will disintegrate and not survive perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun.

On August 19, a massive solar flare and coronal mass ejection hit the comet, which may have been the beginning of the end for the much ballyhooed lump of ice and dirt.

Elenin_1
© NASA/STEREOComet Elenin as seen by the STEREO HI1-B on Aug. 6, 2011, from about 7 million kilometers from the spacecraft.
We've been following it in the STEREO spacecraft images and a number of amateurs have been following it in their telescopes," said Australian amateur astronomer Ian Musgrave, author of the Astroblog website. "Shortly after the coronal mass ejection the comet flared up and you could see some beautiful details in the tail, with the tail was twisting about in the solar wind. But shortly after that Earth- bound amateurs reported a huge decrease in the intensity of the comet. We think it may presage a falling apart of the comet."

One journalist joked that maybe Comet Elenin just couldn't take all the doomsday talk and publicity.

"It really has been a beautiful little comet and it deserves a better fate than to be overhyped by doom-sayers," said Musgrave.

Meteor

New Zealand: Strange light sparks UFO theories and Nibiru hysteria

A strange light filmed in the sky over Auckland on Saturday night was probably not a UFO, comet, or rogue planet about to smash into Earth, astronomers say.

The descending point of light, which revealed a U-shaped nimbus when zoomed in on, was filmed in the sky west of Auckland about 6pm on Saturday.


The video was uploaded to YouTube by a user known as biggordy100 who narrates that the light is "back", indicating he has seen it in the past.

The tag-line on the video reads: "WTF is in our skies? ufo! nibiru? elenin? spaceship? comet? seen over Auckland at 18.00."

Nibiru is the name given by Doomsday and conspiracy blogs and websites to a supposed collision between Earth and a mystery planet - Planet X - that is supposed to occur in the early 21st Century.

Comment: This article is a good example of how unsubstantiated theories based on lies and ignorance lead to even more ignorance, ridicule and faulty science. It's true that Nibiru and Comet Elenin hysteria is blown way out of proportions, but the following statement "if there was something out there that was going to hurt us, we would know about it" clearly demonstrates astronomers' lack of knowledge when it comes to threats from space or PTB's effort to conceal them.

Read the following articles to learn more on the topic:

The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets

Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!

Elenin, Nibiru, Planet-X - Time for a Sanity Check

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


Meteor

Weekend Comet Garradd Show

Over the weekend, incoming Comet Garradd passed beautifully close to globular star cluster M71. For all those amateur astronomers caught under hurricane clouds, John Chumack of Dayton, Ohio, recorded the encounter in the form of a 2.5 hour time-lapse movie:


"It was so cool watching the comet's tail cross the cluster," says Chumack. "I had a great view through my home-made 16-inch telescope."

At the moment, Comet Garradd can only be seen through a backyard telescope (recommended: The Comet Hunter). It is, however, approaching the sun and brightening. Recent projections place it at peak magnitude 6, on the threshold of naked-eye visibility, in February 2012. Because Comet Garradd is a first-time visitor to the inner solar system, it could behave in unexpected ways, perhaps exceeding those expectations. Stay tuned--and meanwhile browse the image links below.

Meteor

Best of the Web: Comet Double Feature: Comets Elenin & Garradd Now Showing in Night Sky

Comet Garradd
© Starry Night SoftwareComet Garradd can be seen right now with binoculars in the constellation Sagitta.

Skywatchers often ask "When's the next comet?" In fact, if you're prepared to do a bit of searching, there are always several comets visible in the night sky, including two right now.

Some comets are like old friends, they keep coming back at regular intervals to visit. These are called periodic comets; Comet Halley was the first such comet to be identified, by Edmond Halley back in 1705. It returns to the inner solar system every 75 to 76 years; its last appearance was in 1986 and its next will be in 2061. At present Halley is out just beyond Neptune's orbit.

Other comets are one-time visitors: they come in to visit us from the Oort Cloud, warm themselves for a few months by the sun, and then head back out to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

There are two comets currently visiting the inner solar system - comet Elenin and comet Garradd - so the next two months will provide some excellent opportunities to observe these unusual visitors. The sky map of the two comets here shows their locations over the next few weeks.