Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

New Comet - C/2012 F6 (Lemmon)

Discovery Date: 23rd March 2012

Magnitude: 20.7 mag

Discoverer: A. R. Gibbs (Mount Lemmon Survey)

C/2012 F6 (Lemmon)
© Aerith NetMagnitude Graph
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-G45.

Meteor

New Comet - P/2012 G1 (PanSTARRS)

Discovery Date: April 13th 2012

Magnitude: 21.1 Mag

Discoverer: Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (Haleakala)

P/2012 G1
© Aerith NetMagnitude Graph
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-H17.

Meteor

It's raining fireballs! April 2 Texas daytime fireball confirmed, another Meteor seen in Chicago Wednesday

Image
Early last week (April 2), thousands of people in and around San Antonio, Texas reported seeing what one eyewitness described as a piece of the sun falling from the sky during full daylight.

Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, initially reported the sighting was a brilliant fireball from a meteor burning up as it entered the Earth's atmosphere. Later, he bowed to other expert's opinion that it was a jet contrail reflecting the glow of the setting sun - apparently based on erroneous footage (of an actual contrail) aired by a local TV station.

This week, though, the sightings were officially reinstated as, in fact, a rare fireball - at least one yard across - bright enough to be seen during daylight.

A fireball is a meteor larger and brighter than normal. The American Meteor Society offers more background:
Fireballs occur every day over all parts of the Earth. It is rare though for an individual to see more than one or two per lifetime as they can also occur during the day (when the blinding sun can obscure them), or on a cloudy night, or over the ocean where there is no one to witness them. Observing during one of the major annual meteor showers can increase your chance of seeing another bright meteor.

Comment: Nothing to see here folks! Fireballs are seen all over the world, every day, always have been, always will be! No doubt when one of them causes serious damage in an urban area, these same 'authorities on fireballs' will tell us that it happens all the time, the city that got hit was 'just unlucky'...

This reshaping of the past to fit the facts of the present is typical of a scientific mindset so hopelessly bound to the extremist uniformitarian worldview.
Uniformitarianism is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe.

~ Wikipedia
"Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia."

~ George Orwell, 1984

Comment: "March 2003", really? That's not what we heard:

Bright meteor streaks across Chicago sky, 19 January 2011

Authorities' explanations for what's going on are starting to wear very thin indeed:

Really? UK Ministry of Defence Claims RAF Jets Rushing To Intercept Private Helicopter Caused Massive Boom That Shook Homes Across England, 13 April 2012

Meteor explodes over Pennsylvania? Big boom still has Poconos buzzing, 7 April 2012


Meteor

Meteorite hits in Siberia? Strange Sounds and Powerful explosion could be heard

irkutsk, meteorite
An image from Russia's "Vesti" Channel
An unidentified glowing object is said to have crashed down from the skies in Russia's Siberia, causing a powerful explosion. A search for the mysterious item is underway amid speculations of what on Earth it could be.

Witnesses describe seeing a bright glow covering the sky, followed by a shining object falling with a strange clanging sound and disappearing in the distance with a blast.

The unidentified object supposedly fell in the taiga forest of the Irkutsk region, 15 kilometers from the nearest village of Vitim, on Friday night. The head of the regional administration said a group of researchers has been sent to inspect the area and question witnesses.

"We will be able to say what it is, only when we see the thing itself and the place where it fell," explained head of the region Aleksandr Sergey. "The investigators, together with hunters are going there on snowmobiles."

Meteor

Meteor explodes over Pennsylvania? Big boom still has Poconos buzzing

Was it a secret military exercise, the beginning of the Mayan prophesy or an alien invasion?

A loud boom, heard by Pocono residents and others throughout northeastern Pennsylvania the night of March 30, remains a mystery.

The boom, heard at about 10:10 p.m., shook cars and houses from Long Pond to Bushkill.

Pocono Record readers at the time speculated it was a tanker wreck on Interstates 80 or 380, a bunch of semi-trucks rolling down a quiet street or an exploding meth lab.

Some residents reported a bright flash in the sky that didn't appear to be lightning just before the blast.

But most readers agreed the sound was no routine thunder.

Comment: "This would be a rare situation". REALLY? Apparently the astronomer that was consulted for this comment has NOT been paying attention to the news!

"Deep Large and Heavy" Boom Over Ohio Blamed On Jet

Really? UK Ministry of Defence Claims RAF Jets Rushing To Intercept Private Helicopter Caused Massive Boom That Shook Homes Across England

'Unbelievable' meteor seen in the skies over New Zealand - residents report 'loud boom' from large fiery meteor

Did You Hear That Boom? Residents Report Saturday Night Sounds that Shook Homes


Meteor

Really? UK Ministry of Defence Claims RAF Jets Rushing To Intercept Private Helicopter Caused Massive Boom That Shook Homes Across England

Emergency services across swaths of England were inundated with calls from worried residents amid reports of a mysterious "loud bang" which turned out to be a sonic boom from two RAF Typhoon jets.

Concerned locals across the Home Counties, Cotswolds, Wiltshire, Somerset and parts of the Midlands reported hearing the deafening noise shortly after 6pm on Thursday amid fears of a large explosion.

But rather than anything sinister, it was a sonic boom caused by a pair of Royal Air Force Typhoon jets breaking the sound barrier, the Ministry of Defence said.

The Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) crews were scrambled after a civilian helicopter emitted an emergency signal in the Oxford area.

MoD sources said the "idiot" pilot, who has not been identified, had used a wrong frequency to emit the emergency signal that usually indicates an aircraft has either been hijacked or had "gone rogue".

Fearing that a serious incident was unfolding, MoD officials gave the jets the green light to go "supersonic, which resulted in the sonic boom".

Comment: Really? This sounds like the MOD making up a lame plausible answer to what is clearly not a sonic boom. Sonic booms are not heard across hundreds of miles of countryside. And why would RAF jets be scrambled and allowed to go supersonic (which is only authorised in extreme circumstances) in response to what was a fairly benign situation? In addition, this boom was heard six hours before another massive boom was heard across a wide area of Ohio, USA. Given the large number of meteorite sightings across the globe in recent years, including loud unexplained booms, the most likely explanation is that what people heard, both in the UK and Ohio, was the overhead detonation of a meteorite fragment.


Meteor

Hundreds Report Seeing Fireball in the Sky Over Chicago

Skywatchers across the Chicago area reported a streaking fireball in the sky so intense that some thought they'd witnessed a fiery plane crash on the Southeast Side.

Reports of the fireball starting coming in about 8:25 p.m., according to a meteor and meteorite sighting blog, with over 100 people from Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa reporting the light show.

Descriptions ranged from simply a blue-green fireball to a yellow fireball with a red center and a trailing blue-and-white tail.

John from North Chicago wrote "12sec NW green/blue very bright unknown it only lasted about 12sec but it was a sight to see truly amazing."

But while many delighted in the display, others thought they'd witnessed something much grimmer as emergency crews responded to 126th Street and Avenue 0 on the Far Southeast Side of the city to investigate a possible plane crash.

Meteor

Trooper, motorist: Mysterious object fell from sky

Meteor
© WWLPFile photo.
Authorities in northwestern Connecticut say they didn't find anything after a state trooper and another person reported a large object falling out of the sky in Litchfield.

The Republican-American of Waterbury reports that a person driving in Litchfield at about 2 a.m. Tuesday reported that a green, glowing object the size of a whale fell from the sky and crashed into Bantam Lake. Officials say that at about the same time, a state trooper 10 miles away in Warren called dispatchers to report that something fell out of the sky and landed near Bantam or Morris.

Morris firefighters made several passes up and down the lake in a boat looking for a possible plane crash, but didn't find any debris.

Authorities called off the search, leaving the mystery unsolved.

Meteor

NASA reinvents history to make increasing numbers of fireballs seem normal

Texas Fireball
© YouTube | CelestialconvergenceA spectacular fireball streaked across the Texas sky April 4.

A great ball of fire streaked across the Texas sky during the daytime last week, much to the surprise of thousands of people who witnessed it. So bright that it looked "like a little piece of the sun falling," as one San Antonio resident told the local news station, the rare daytime meteor event was yet another example of the scientific mystery known as spring fireball season.

According to NASA, 30 years of observations show that there's a consistent uptick in the number of fireballs - meteors that glow brighter than the planets as they scorch through Earth's atmosphere - during the spring compared with other times of the year. "There are two peaks: one around February and the other at the end of March and early April," said Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "And this remains a mystery."

The Texas event was bright enough to have corresponded to the atmospheric burnup of a space rock at least a yard across, Cooke told Life's Little Mysteries. But no one knows why springtime meteors are 10 to 30 percent more common. "I can tell you a lot of the bright and slow fireballs appear to be coming from the direction opposite the sun, but they have not much in common other than that," he said. "You see a lot more ordinary meteors in the fall, but the spring seems to have the big slow movers - the ones that are really impressive."

Comment: This phenomenon is certainly anything but 'rare', as the original headline of the above article claimed:

First 'February Fireballs', now 'April Fireballs': Daytime Meteor Streaks over Texas

As for NASA. they're just making this stuff up to fool folks.
"There are two peaks: one around February and the other at the end of March and early April," said Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.
Really? That's not what Bill said back in February this year when the so-called 'February Fireballs phenomenon' was first promoted:

"Fireballs of February"?

No mention of this "second peak in late March or early April"...

Go to Wiki's page on meteor showers. See anything listed for late March or early April? Nope, NASA is just making BS up as it goes along.


Meteor

Propaganda Alert! Defunct Russian satellite to ram into Earth again

Image
© unknown

Molnia (Lightning) satellite, which Russia launched into space during the 1990s to control missiles, may crash on Earth during the upcoming several days.

The location of Molnia's crash has not been determined yet. The satellite may cause considerable destruction during the fall. It weighs 1.6 tons. However, the spacecraft may partially burn in the atmosphere when falling.

The satellite may fall down on the planet before April 9th. Most likely, it will crash somewhere in the center of the Arab Peninsula.

Russian specialists monitor the spacecraft. The service time of the satellite is two years, the Fifth Channel reports.

Molnia-1T satellites were replaced with Meridian military spacecraft during the 2000s.

Two spacecraft went off Earth's orbit last week. They were the first Soviet satellite Meteor-1 and one of the first US research satellites Explorer-8.

The satellite may fall down on the planet before April 9th. Most likely, it will crash somewhere in the center of the Arab Peninsula.

Russian specialists monitor the spacecraft. The service time of the satellite is two years, the Fifth Channel reports.

Molnia-1T satellites were replaced with Meridian military spacecraft during the 2000s.

Two spacecraft went off Earth's orbit last week. They were the first Soviet satellite Meteor-1 and one of the first US research satellites Explorer-8.

Comment: More disinformation as fireballs rain down...

First 'February Fireballs', now 'April Fireballs': Daytime Meteor Streaks over Texas