Fireballs
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Fireball 5

Meteor fireball streaks across U.S. East coast skies

East coast meteor
© NASA
Did you see a fireball Tuesday night? You weren't alone.

A bright meteor was spotted from New York to Kentucky about 8:40 p.m., prompting more than 100 reports to the American Meteor Society. A high concentration of sightings came from the D.C. area.

"It was the brightest meteor I've ever seen," one Arlington resident wrote.

"I have seen fireballs before. This was the closest one I've ever seen," one Leesburg resident reported "This appeared to be very close and bright. Like you could see the ball of fire at the end of the trail almost."

According to the American Meteor Society, fireballs are very bright meteors, about as bright as Venus in the morning and evening skies.

About 10 to 15 meteorites fall to Earth each day, but sightings are rare since streaking fireballs often fall over the ocean, or during daylight hours when they can't be seen.

Fireball

Lunar impact event sighted

Lunar Impact event
© Aberystwyth UniversityX marks the spot where the meteorite hit the moon.
Space scientists at Aberystwyth University have reported what they believe to be the first confirmed sighting in the British Isles of a meteorite hitting the Moon.

A Lunar Impact Flash - a flash of light when something hits the Moon's surface - was recorded on the southern hemisphere of the Moon and probably caused by a small meteorite the size of a golf ball.

Lasting less that one tenth of a second, the image was caught on New Year's Day 2017 on a remotely operated telescope at Aberystwyth University.
Lunar Impact Flashes are notoriously difficult to record. The meteorite would be travelling at anywhere between 10 to 70 km per second as it hit the surface of the Moon. That is the equivalent of travelling from Aberystwyth to Cardiff in just a few seconds, and the resulting impact would be over in a fraction of a second.

A similar meteorite hitting the Earth's atmosphere would produce a beautiful shooting star, but as the Moon has no atmosphere it slams into the surface, causing a crater the size of very large pot hole. Just under 1% of the meteorite's energy is converted into a flash of light, which we were able to record here in Aberystwyth.

- Dr Tony Cook, Aberystwyth University
Scientists estimate the Moon is hit by similar sized meteorites as often as once every 10 to 20 hours.

Fireball 2

Large blue meteor fireball illuminates sky over Sweden

Bright blue fireball over Sweden on March 20, 2017
© Jessica DellsjöBright blue fireball over Sweden on March 20, 2017.
A very large blue fireball illuminated the sky over Sweden around 20:30 UTC (21:30 CET) on March 20, 2017. The event was so powerful that the whole sky lit up, Swedish All Sky Meteor Network astronomers said.

Images of the event immediately started appearing on social networks, with people from the cities of Stockholm, Uppsala and Örebro all reported seeing the event. Reports from eastern Uppland mention sonic boom associated with the event.

"This is something that happens a few times a year," Eric Stempels of the Swedish Allsky Meteor Network project told The Local.

"Because it can happen during the day, when it is cloudy or far from populated areas, these events usually don't get much attention," he said, adding that this one fell in the north-eastern Uppland region.

Experts believe that this particular bolide may have been unusually large and Stempels estimated that it is possible it was between the size of a fist and a football.


Fireball 4

Dashcam captures meteor fireball over downtown Denver, Colorado

Meteor over downtown Denver
© YouTube/Coordman
Meteor Recorded on Dashcam Downtown Denver, CO:


Comet 2

Comet Halley - Close encounters of the cometary kind

Halley's Comet
© Malaga Bay
Researchers trawling through the dusty corners of the Academic Archives primarily have to rely upon serendipity to provide them with break-through information.

However, when serendipity strikes the results can be startling.

Such was the case a few weeks ago when the Glen Turret Fan chronology neatly slid into place between the Arabian Horizon and the Heinsohn Horizon in the Old Japanese Cedar Tree chronology.
The Glen Turret Fan in upper Glen Roy contains 276 annual sedimentary layers that are coincidentally close to the 277 years between the Arabian Horizon of 637 CE and the Heinsohn Horizon of 914 CE i.e. the Heinsohn Sandwich.
...
The unexplained arrival of the Sand Bed in the Glen Turret Fan [upper Glen Roy] in 759 CE coincidentally echoes:

a) the unexplained Smothering of Samarra in sand
b) the unexplained Covering of Cologne in sand
c) the unexplained Clear Black Horizons in sand across Southern England and Scotland
d) the unexplained Sandy Sludge Layers in the Greenland Ice Cores...

See: The Fold Up Beds of Glen Roy
Old Japanese Cedar Tree chronology
© Malaga Bay
And then serendipity struck again in form of Comet Halley.

Comet Halley has several remarkable aspects.

Fireball 2

Meteor fireball seen in the skies above Greater Vancouver

meteor
A fireball was sighted speeding across the skies of the Metro Vancouver area late on March 16.

This footage, filmed by Tammy Kwan, a staff writer for Vancouver weekly newspaper The Georgia Straight, shows the bright ball visible above a stretch of Lougheed Highway in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia. In her writeup for The Georgia Straight, Kwan wrote that she had captured the video on her dashcam, and the sky "suddenly flashed green and then pale yellow."


Fireball

Meteor fireball lights up the sky near Orange, Australia

The meteor is spotted by a motorists travelling on the Escort Way.
The meteor is spotted by a motorists travelling on the Escort Way.
A meteor fireball blasting to Earth was spotted near Orange on Wednesday night.

Video footage of the bright light with a fiery tail was identified by skywatching expert Rod Somerville.

"That one to me looks just like a nice bright meteor, known as a fireball," he said.

The footage was taken from a car travelling on the Escort Way near Boree about 7.45pm and uploaded to YouTube by David Bell.


Fireball 4

Exploding meteor fireball causes panic in Pakistan´s mountainous north

meteor fireball explodes over Pakistan
© YouTube/Wapgee Inc (screen capture)
A suspected meteor lit up the skies above Pakistan´s mountainous north late Wednesday, officials said, with panicked residents reporting a mysterious light whizzing past and the sound of multiple, powerful blasts.

The incident occurred around 9PM, when citizens in the city of Gilgit and the surrounding Ghizer and Diamer districts saw the bright object racing through the night sky above the region´s remote, soaring mountains.

"I saw a light flash through the sky and then there were multiple blasts," Ghizer district resident Javed Iqbal told AFP Thursday.

"I felt as if something had hit the roof of my house. I rushed outside with my family members and saw everyone getting out of their homes. The blasts had shaken the whole valley," he said.

His story was echoed by others, including Shabir Mir of Gilgit, who said he saw the object "disappear into the mountains", followed seconds later by what sounded like more than one explosion.


Comet 2

New Comet: C/2017 E4 (LOVEJOY)

CBET nr. 4373, issued on 2017, March 13, announces the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~15) by Terry James Lovejoy on three CCD 8-s exposures taken five minutes apart starting on Mar. 9.684 UT with a Celestron C14 reflector operating at f/1.9 (+ QHY9 camera). The new comet has been designated C/2017 E4 (LOVEJOY).

I performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 10 unfiltered exposures, 30 seconds each, obtained remotely on 2017, March 10.7 from Q62 (iTelescope network) through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + focal reducer, shows that this object is a comet with a diffuse coma nearly 15 arcsec in diameter.

My confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
Comet Lovejoy C/2017
© Remanzacco Blogspot

Telescope

Study: Warped meteor showers hit Earth at all angles

Some meteor showers persist for weeks and months, even though Earth sweeps a big arc around the Sun during that time. The meteors arrive from a slightly different direction each day, which is a clue to why these showers last so long. In a review of ongoing meteor surveillance projects worldwide, 45 showers are identified that take this motion to extremes, visualized in spectacular animation.
Warped kappa Cygnids meteor
© SETIThe warped kappa Cygnids meteor shower peaks in mid August.
"I was most surprised by some showers that were initially seen close to the plane of the planets, but then moved up towards the pole over the course of weeks," says meteor astronomer Dr. Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.

Jenniskens runs the NASA sponsored project Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) in Northern California, which aims to confirm some of the 300+ meteor showers on the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Working List that still need verification. 60 low-light video cameras film the skies over the San Francisco Bay Area and have recorded more than 300,000 meteoroid trajectories since beginning observations in 2010.

The observations show that meteor showers do not stay in one place. For example, the well-known Perseids get their name from the constellation of Perseus from which they radiate at their peak in mid-August. But the camera networks first detect the shower on July 1 in Cassiopeia. And the Perseids are tracked until September 3, when the meteors radiate from the neighboring constellation Camelopardalis.