Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

US: Huge bright green light falling over Southern New Jersey (fireball?)

Posted: March 23, 2010

Date: March 23, 2010
Time: 3:05 a.m.
Location of Sighting: Southern New Jersey.
Number of witnesses: 2
Number of Objects: 1
Shape of Objects: Round.

Full Description of Event/Sighting: My boyfriend and I were driving home on Broadway St in Pitman NJ (towards Glassboro) and we saw a bright green light fall from the sky. We only saw it for a few seconds before it disappeared behind trees. It came down at a rough estimate of a 70 degree angle falling from right to left. At first we thought it was a plane crashing, it was huge, but nothing happened after it vanished behind the trees.

Meteor

US: Fireball Streaks Through Night Sky of Western Alabama

Fireball
© Physorg.comFireball Streaks Through Night Sky of Western Alabama.
Vigilant sky watchers were treated to a fiery surprise in western Alabama sky on Friday, March 19.

Allsky meteor cameras at the Marshall Center and near Chickamauga, Ga., recorded a fireball streaking across the sky around 11:19 p.m. CDT.

Moving at a speed of 42,500 mph -- or 12 miles per second -- the meteor burned up approximately 20 miles up in the atmosphere. Although very bright, the meteor was deemed not large enough to produce meteorites.

Mid-March is typically a lull period for meteor shower activity, but several bright fireballs have recently been spotted over California, Mississippi and now Alabama.

Watch a short video clip of the meteor.

Meteor

UK: Fireball shoots in from outer space

Channel Islanders have been left baffled after what looked like a meteor flashed across the sky on Sunday night.

The fireball was first spotted in Guernsey before hurtling over the east of Jersey seconds later. Residents in both islands reported that the unidentified object was moving very quickly and very low across the sky.

Patrick Devaney, a Guernsey teacher, said that he watched the 'meteor' shoot from Herm diagonally over St Peter Port and towards Jersey.

Jersey Met Office confirmed that it received a report from an Islander in Gorey of what appeared to be a meteor 'dashing very low and very fast' across the sky at about 10 pm on Sunday. But Jersey's Air Traffic Control department said that it had not detected anything on its radar.

Meteor

US: Unexplained 'boom' generates calls to 911 center

Maysville, Kentucky - Concerned citizens reported hearing a loud boom and feeling possible tremors to the Maysville Emergency 911 Dispatch Center Thursday night.

Maysville Police Chief Kent Butcher and Maysville-Mason County Emergency Management Director Jack Fultz said Thursday the reports of the unusually loud boom, which apparently caused buildings to shake and windows to rattle, started coming into the dispatch center around 9:25 p.m. Fultz said at one time, he was told about 50 calls came into the 911 center, most from Mason County, but some were from citizens in Brown County.

Fultz said he felt the repercussions of the boom at his home, located in western Mason County near Dover and he immediately checked the National Geological Earthquake Web site, but there were no reports of earthquake activity in the Ohio River Valley region.

During business hours Thursday, Fultz said he was told by Larry Dixon, area manager for Kentucky Emergency Management Morehead Office a similar incident occurred in Pendleton County earlier this week, but the boom and subsequent aftershock were attributed to activity at Black River Mine.

Meteor

Ohio: Unexplained Boom Heard in Brown and Neighboring Counties

Brown County
© WTOL.com
Georgetown - People in the eastern reaches of the Tri-state are trying to figure out what the big noise was that they heard in the sky Thursday night. Brown County dispatchers say they heard a booming sound their station in Georgetown, and had calls from Mt. Orab in the northern part of the county, and from Ripley and Aberdeen on the river. Some Mt. Orab callers said it shook their homes.

Police in Hillsboro got seven calls shortly after 9 p.m. from people saying they had heard a sound. One thought it might have been in the neighborhood, but several other callers described it as a sonic boom. A Hillsboro dispatcher who was in Highland County toward Chillicothe saw a fighter jet that appeared to be in training dropping flares as it crossed the sky, but she didn't notice any boom sound.

Bracken county dispatchers say they had a couple calls from the east side of Augusta from people who said it shook their trailers. The sound was also heard in Mason County in Kentucky.

Meteor

Fireball Over Southwestern Nebraska

Fireball
© Cloudbait Observatory
This bright fireball occurred at 05:25 AM MDT over southwestern Nebraska. This meteor was not associated with any known shower.

Data has been recovered from the following cameras: The image at left is from the Cloudbait camera.

The meteor began very close to the border corner between Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. It first appeared at a height of 100 km, descended at a zenith angle of 40° and stopped burning following an intense terminal explosion at a height of 77 km. The meteor had an average speed of 44 km/s (99,000 mph).

Both the speed and entry angle are at the upper bounds of where we might expect meteorites to survive. Also, meteorites are usually associated with bodies that fragment much lower than this one. High altitude winds at the time were to the south at 32 m/s, which suggest that any meteorite strewn field would be shifted south of the meteor ground path by up to 20 km

Meteor

Louisiana: Loud boom heard in area last week likely a "meteor"

A meteor hurtling through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound likely caused the sonic like boom that startled many residents in LaSalle Parish and throughout north central Louisiana late last Monday afternoon.

The loud noise, first believed to be a sonic boom or gas pipeline explosion, happened just before 5 p.m. on Monday and was heard from the Arkansas-Louisiana line, to the Mississippi River, to Natchitoches and to below Alexandria.

Earlier, experts said a high-speed aircraft probably made the sound, but checks with air bases in the area found no planes were in the air at the time.

Law enforcement officers in several parishes, including LaSalle, searched for a possible pipeline explosion, but found nothing.

Later, residents of Memphis, Tennessee said they saw a fire ball traveling through the skies and a resident of Bunkie claims she saw a gray mass with no flames moving through the sky at the about the same time the loud boom was heard on Monday.

Louisiana Delta Community College meteorologist Don Wheeler said evidence indicates a meteor was the apparent cause of the sonic boom.

Meteor

Mississippi, US: 'Boom' Baffles Region

The source of an enormous boom heard by some across parts of Mississippi on Sunday afternoon remains a mystery.

James Hill, director of the Rainwater Observatory in French Camp, said the the loud, long noise Grenada Countians heard could be anything from a jet sonic boom to a meteorite exploding.

"We haven't had any reports at the observatory of a meteor," he said.

Grenada Countian Rina Chaney said she was sitting on the front porch with her daughter in the Hardy community Sunday at 2 p.m. when they heard what she described as "a long crack of thunder."

Meteor

Fireball over Arizona

Talk about nights at different extremes. Two nights ago had to rank as one of the most boring nights of the past 2 years. Not only were a small number (6) meteors seen by my deep cameras, no meteors were seen by my wide-angle fireball camera. For a clear night you should see at least 3 or 4 bright ones.

Last night (Sunday, March 14) was better. What really set it apart was a bright fireball seen over Tucson at ~10:14 pm (5:14 UT). Both of my cameras picked it up. The first movie shows the very early stages of the fireball. Since my SALSA2 camera only has a FOV of about 50×70 degrees, this camera was lucky to see any of it. In the movie the fireball is moving nearly due north (north is to the bottom) and first becomes visible just to the north of Leo.




Meteor

Mississippi, US: Fireball streaking across sky alarmed witnesses

A bizarre daytime occurrence had the phones ringing in WLBT's newsroom Sunday.

Viewers calling with wide spread reports of mysterious fireballs in the sky and loud booms baffled state agencies and eye witnesses alike.

"It didn't last but maybe three or four seconds, and it was gone," said Phoronia Coring.

She was driving north from Tylertown Sunday afternoon when something strange in the sky caught her eye.

"I looked sort of to the east of 55 and it was just this fire ball that was falling out of the sky and it made you think of a falling star expect during the day, and it was just bright red," said Coring.