Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

US: Witness describes 'bright blue/green fireball' with long tail in Colorado night sky


lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com
Sat, 03 Sep 2011 05:37 UTC
MBIQ (Meteor Bot Internet Query) Indicates NE Colorado Meteor Event 2SEP2011

Colorado, east of Greeley and Northeast of Kersey: Bright Blue/Green Meteor Fireball seen at 4:00 am, 2 September 2011
My friend and I were at work out at 70 Ranch located at CR 388 and CR 53 Around 4 O'clock AM...9/2/2011. I saw a light that looked like a shooting star. It was bright out of the North and then it shot like a star to the East and then stopped for a few seconds. Then it came down from the north going south and then about a half mile to a mile off the ground it turned a dark to bright green a couple hundred feet around it and then it was traveling towards the ground with a Long tail burning. Looked green and blue. Then it came down and got really low to the ground before It looked like it was going to hit. It may have burnt out but don't know. Just thought it was awesome so I looked it up on the news and no one reported it. My other friend was on the phone about 30miles south of me when I saw it, and he saw it to and asked me if I saw it too. Just thought it was cool so went to this website when I looked up meteors and it said I could report it here if I saw anything. So I figured I would see what you guys knew. Thanks - Mark Merriott
Thank you Mark for your fine report!

Fort Collins, Colorado - arrived from google.com on "Latest Worldwide Meteor/Meteorite News" by searching for green fireball 9/2/11.
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Sun

Sun Unleashes Massive Solar Flares in One-Two Punch

Mike Wall
Space.com
Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:48 UTC
Sunspot 1283
© NASA/SDO/GSFCThis image taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory watching the sun shows a powerful solar flare (center right) just minutes after it erupted on 6:20 p.m. EDT (2220 GMT) on Sept. 6, 2011.

Just as many Americans got back to work after the long Labor Day weekend, the sun jolted to life as well, unleashing a massive solar flare just one day after another sun storm sent a stream of particles racing toward Earth.

The X-class solar flare - the most powerful type of sun storm - erupted at 6:12 p.m. EDT (2212 GMT) on Tuesday (Sept. 6) and hit its peak strength eight minutes later, according to a space weather update by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The flare occurred less than 24 hours after another less intense but still dramatic solar storm.

Several different satellites watched the action unfold, including NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which constantly records high-definition videos of the sun in several different wavelengths.

The Tuesday event registered as an X2.1-class solar flare, while Monday's storm topped out at a still-powerful M5, NOAA officials said. Strong solar flares are classified according to a three-tiered system: X-class flares are the most powerful, M-class are of medium strength and C-class are the weakest.
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Meteor

Best of the Web: Kenya's Rain of Meteorites

Kelly Beatty
Sky and Telescope
Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:59 UTC
Kenya Meteorite
© Michael FarmerMeteorite hunter Michael Farmer poses with Rose Kamande, who found this 7.7-pound (3.5-kg) stone on July 17, 2011 — one day after meteorites fell from the sky in the villages surrounding Thika, Kenya.
Statistically, every year roughly 1,400 meteorites of pebble size and larger fall somewhere on Earth's lands. But few of these are ever found - and even fewer (about 3%) are actually seen as they arrive. Because they're rare, these witnessed falls are especially prized both by scientists (because the stones are fresh and unweathered) and by meteorite collectors (they command higher prices).

As it happens, a bunch of meteorites fell from the sky over east-central Africa on July 16th, and only now are details of this extraterrestrial special delivery coming to light.

On that morning, residents in villages near Thika, Kenya, heard a loud explosion but didn't know what to make of the strange stones that fell around them. Local police were called to investigate a sizable one that dropped into a cornfield and carted it off for further study.

This is a desperately poor region, and it didn't take long for local villagers to realize that these plain-looking rocks might be worth something. Word of the event soon reached meteorite hunters, and within hours the chase was on.
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Meteor

Comet Elenin - the Final Prospect

Leonid Elenin
SpaceObs
Sat, 03 Sep 2011 23:37 UTC
Comet Elenin
© NASA
As many readers already know, Comet Elenin has begun the irreversible process of breaking up. We spoke earlier about the probablility of such an outcome, but I considered it less than 50%. On the graph at left you can see a selection of ten comets that approach the Sun closer than 0.5 a.u. The red line shows the boundary, to the left of which, derived from J. Bortle's formula, is the safe zone, but to the right is the zone of disintegration. The yellow color shows Comet Elenin, with absolute magnitude obtained by visual observations, and the blue is from JPL-NASA data. As we see, Bortle's formula, all-in-all, doesn't work too badly. Although there is a bright exception - the green triangle belongs to the unique comet 96P/Machholtz, about which I will speak next time.

Now it is absolutely clear that the comet's drop in brightness, first noted by Michael Mattiazzo on Aug. 20th, was not coincidental - the decay process had already begun, and over the course of the next several days the comet changed greatly. Its pseudo-nucleus became diffuse and extended, and later vanished completely. On images from Sept. 1st in the comet's coma there was no condensation visible, and that meant the comet had already broken up into fairly small pieces, with a maximum size of not more than a hundred meters.
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Meteor

Best of the Web: Space Junk Rising Exponentially (and No, It's Not Man-Made)

Ian Sample
The Guardian, UK
Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:52 UTC
Image
© Getty ImagesForget man-made space junk, the real threat is coming from further out in our solar system.
Scientists warn of 'tipping point' but shuttle's demise means there is no easy way to remove defunct satellites

The amount of junk in space is rising exponentially, with continuous collisions between abandoned equipment, spent rockets and other debris creating ever growing clouds of dangerous fragments, an influential report warned on Thursday.

The report, commissioned by NASA, says the quantity of hazardous material circling the Earth has reached a "tipping point" and poses a real and increasing danger to satellites and the International Space Station.

It suggests developing a clean-up strategy, which could include catching debris with nets, magnets or giant umbrellas.
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Meteor

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


Duluth News Tribune
Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:18 UTC
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.
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Meteor

Search for meteorite in west of Ireland


RTE News
Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:30 UTC
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.
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Meteor

India: Delhi boys discover asteroid

Madhur Tankha
The Hindu
Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:12 UTC
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.
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Meteor

Wales, UK: Cardiff student discovers two new asteroids

Graham Henry
WalesOnline
Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:10 UTC
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."
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Meteor

US: 'Too Bright' Meteor Streaks Over Atlanta Skies


International Business Times
Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:11 UTC
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.
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