Fireballs
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Fireball 4

Fireball seen over Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky and West Virginina


Lunar Meteorite Hunters
Sat, 19 Jul 2014 15:31 UTC
Image

Initial Meteor Sighting Reports:

18JUL2014 Ashley Franklin Ohio 5:03 am est 6 E Bright Green followed by red flame very bright fire balls falling off I've seen shooting stars/comets before but never seen nothing like we just saw this morning. My fiance said omg what the heck is that I look up and see a huge bright green ball falling from the sky. It was pretty cool to see

18JUL2014 Genia Bloomington, Indiana USA 5:00:00 10 Eastern sky traveling left to right Blue and red tail bright white head Brighter then the moon No It was so brilliant and colorful.

18JUL2014 j. duke marietta, ohio 500 3 seconds Facing SW Direction of travel W to E about 30 deg RA only lost sight because of obstructions to view green with yellow halo and tail no other heavenly bodies for comparison. not as bright as the sun or moon but quite visable. Looked as a firework. single object I was returning home from work. Stopped at a traffic light. Checking for cross-traffic I observed the object, and watched as it passed veiwable area between buildings.

Comment: As the chart below vividly shows, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of reported fireballs for the last 2 years.



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Fireball 5

Fireball seen over North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia

Zachary Stieber
Epoch Times
Fri, 18 Jul 2014 00:03 UTC
Fireball
© Epoch TimesScreenshot 2014-07-17 at 9.29.08 PM.
A meteor or fireball was spotted over North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey on Thursday night.

Many people reported seeing the bright light in the sky between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. EDT. Dan Perhar, a software developer at North Carolina University, captured it around 10:15 p.m. as he was driving on Interstate 440 in Raleigh.

He posted the short video on YouTube.

NASA Solar System Ambassador and WRAL contributor Tony Rice viewed the video. "Looking at that dashcam video it looked pretty low on the horizon. That flash may have been it breaking up," Rice posted on Twitter.

Comment: As the chart below vividly shows, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of reported fireballs for the last 2 years.



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Fireball 4

Texans spooked as massive meteor fireball upstages Supermoon, splits in two

Teresa Gubbins
Culture Map, Dallas
Sun, 13 Jul 2014 00:34 UTC

Image
© David Worthington10 minutes after the Supermoon rose over downtown Dallas...
A meteor crossed the sky over North Texas on July 12 at 9 pm, enthralling many around Dallas who watched as it split into two before its inevitable fade. From Denton to Waxahachie, from Lake Ray Roberts to Lake Tawakoni, night-sky viewers witnessed what some described as a double meteor, with two streams of blue-green light racing across the sky to the west.

Many were already watching the sky to catch what was the first perigee moon, aka Supermoon, of 2014. According to Dallas photographer David Worthington, who was lying in wait to photograph the moon against the Dallas skyline, the moon became visible at 8:55 pm. The meteor emerged less than 10 minutes later.

Midlothian resident Mike Prendergast was moon-watching with friends when they spotted what they first thought was an airplane.

Comment: Check out some eyewitnesses' reports: a LOT of people saw this one and many of them were pretty spooked. SOTT.net reader KM also sent us her description of the event:
Saturday July 12th, 2014

We were on the beach at North Padre Island Texas watching the moon, when my granddaughter & I both noticed a light screaming across the night sky. We both thought is was a plane or helicopter and then looked at each other with our mouthes open. It was too big and too fast for either. It was a round circle of light screaming across and downward across the sky. All of a sudden it changed into two lights and then was gone. It was about 9 pm. Everyone with us was looking toward the ocean & moon and the light was off to our left. No doubt it was something, but not sure what. What could this have been. We are still talking about it......


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Fireball 5

Bird? Plane? No, it was 'definitely' a meteor across Melbourne skies

Matt Cram
3AW693
Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:23 UTC
Melbourne Fireball
© 3AW693
Astronomy experts have confirmed a meteor burned across Melbourne skies last night.

Melburnians, as well as people in Gippsland, NSW and Tasmania saw the spectacular light show, which lasted about 20 seconds.
@3AW693 pic.twitter.com/VQz1f8a97G

- Matt Kearsley (@matt_kearsley) July 10, 2014
@3AW693 in Tullamarine 9.47pm pic.twitter.com/ZpRlsjXmGa

- Jan Laczynski (@YYarni) July 10, 2014
Witnessed one of the most amazing things in my life at work tonight, never thought I'd see a meteor spectacular sight #MelbourneMeteor

- Mitchell Clark (@Mitchclark18) July 10, 2014
Wow, just witnessed the amazing meteor / shooting star on way home from mums. Amazing! #melbournemeteor #melbourneshootingstar

- Lauren Clair (@lozclair) July 10, 2014
The 3AW talkback line lit up as Melburnians realised what was happening.

John told 3AW Nightline he pulled over while driving in Keilor Park to watch the light show.
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Fireball 5

Possible meteor spotted over Southern Manitoba

Brett Megarry
cjob.com
Wed, 09 Jul 2014 15:14 UTC
Fireball
© cjob.com
There are reports of a fireball streaking through the skies of Southern Manitoba.

Scott Young with the Manitoba Museum tells CJOB they got some calls from the Interlake just before 11 this morning.

"Saying, is there something going on? I saw this big trail of smoke in the sky and then we had a big explosion, but I didn't hear any sounds. What's with that?

Well we think what happened is a little asteroid or a big version of a meteor came into the atmosphere somewhere over Central Manitoba, and exploded."

Young says they can't pinpoint where it was yet, but they suspect it was in western Manitoba, so they're asking for anyone who saw it to let them know, so they can triangulate a location.
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Fireball 4

Close approach of PHA asteroid 2014 MF6

Ernesto Guido, Nick Howes & Martino Nicolini
Remanzacco Observatory
Wed, 09 Jul 2014 14:17 UTC
The asteroid 2014 MF6 was discovered (at magnitude ~17.0) on 2014, June 23.3 by Catalina Sky Survey (MPC code 703) with a 0.68-m Schmidt + CCD.

According to the preliminay orbit, 2014 MF6 is an Apollo type asteroid. This class of asteroids are defined by having semi-major axes greater than that of the Earth (> 1 AU) but perihelion distances less than the Earth's aphelion distance (q < 1.017 AU). It is also flagged as a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid". PHA are asteroids larger than approximately 100m that might have threatening close approaches to the Earth (they can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU).

2014 MF6 has an estimated size of 190 m - 420 m (based on the object's absolute magnitude H=20.7) and it will have a close approach with Earth at about 9.1 LD (Lunar Distances = ~384,000 kilometers) or 0.0233 AU (1 AU = ~150 million kilometers) at 1939 UT on 2014, July 09. This asteroid will reach the peak magnitude ~15.3 on the period from 06 to 09 July 2014.

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object on 2014, July 09.4, remotely from the Q62 iTelescope network (Siding Spring, AU) through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + focal reducer). Below you can see our image taken with the asteroid at magnitude ~15.3 and moving at ~ 40.43 "/min. Click on the image below to see a bigger version. North is up, East is to the left (the asteroid is trailed in the image due to its fast speed).
PHA Asteroid 2014 MF6
© Remanzacco Observatory
Here you can see a short animation showing the movement of 2014 MF6 (three consecutive 60-second exposure). East is up, North is to the right.
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Info

Scientists discover radio emissions from fireballs


Phys Org
Tue, 08 Jul 2014 16:39 UTC
Radio Emissions
© Phys OrgThese images show the sky above the first LWA station. Each image shows the full sky, down to the horizon at the image's edge.
Streaking across the sky at more than 50 kilometers per second at atmospheric heights of more than a 90 kilometers high, researchers using the first station of University of New Mexico's Long Wavelength Array (LWA) saw something new that had never been seen before; something that could hold a treasure trove of new information in the world of physics.

The first station of the LWA, known as LWA1, is a unique telescope that consists of a collection of 256 dipoles combined into one massive array with a collective-area of a 100-meter dish. The LWA1, is a highly sensitive telescope that can create images of the entire sky. It allows researchers to keep eyes on the whole sky day and night, probing a relatively unexplored region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Within six months of turning LWA1 on, UNM Department of Physics Professor Greg Taylor and his team got the all sky imaging up and running. Shortly thereafter, they started to search for transients, brief pulses of radio waves coming from the sky. Ken Obenberger, a UNM graduate student, and colleagues searched for transients in more than 11,000 hours of all-sky images from the LWA at frequencies between 25 and 75 MHz. In this data he identified 49 long (30 seconds or longer) transients.
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Fireball

Scientists worry an asteroid impact will someday be mistaken for an act of war

Jason Keobler
Motherboard.vice.com
Tue, 08 Jul 2014 14:01 UTC
The graph below, titled "Known Near-Earth Asteroids," is simultaneously both terrifying and a little bit comforting. Problem is, the Y-axis on a hypothetical graph titled "Unknown Near-Earth Asteroids" would definitely extend much, much higher. Either way, we don't have a good deal of knowledge about what to do about potentially Earth-threatening asteroids, anyway.

Image
© BulletinOfTheAtomic @BulletinAtomic
That much was clear back in February of last year, when a meteor struck Chelyabinsk, Russia. The meteor came, as far as NASA and other groups that track such things are concerned, from nowhere.

The fear now is that a Chelyabinsk-sized asteroid could hit a city in a war-torn or politically tense area, which would be the powder keg necessary to throw a whole region into turmoil. It may seem like a longshot, and it may seem like something not worth worrying about, but John Remo, a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher would beg to differ. Remo just published a paper in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that warns that an asteroid impact could easily be seen as an act of war.

Comment: Looked at from another angle: what if, given the reality of increased cometary material in near-space and the atmosphere, the Powers That Be deliberately orchestrate wars to mask the cosmic threat? In other words, an aggressive regime might intentionally conflate a celestial object with an inter-continental ballistic missile... It's much easier to retain control so long as the little people are scared of man-made wars - incoming comets would see the powerful lose their power altogether.

The reader may enjoy Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection: The Secret History of the World - Book 3 - "a ground-breaking attempt to re-connect modern science with ancient understanding that the human mind and states of collective human experience can influence cosmic and earthly phenomena."

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Fireball 5

Meteor fireball startles the population of Chihuahua, Mexico


Sott.net
Mon, 07 Jul 2014 10:15 UTC
meteoro México
© El Heraldo de Chihuahua
Last Saturday night, at 9 pm, a fireball turned the night sky into day across several towns in Chihuahua, Mexico. Eyewitnesses reported having seen the object burst into small pieces and disintegrate after having traveled for a few minutes, leaving a white, yellow, orange and green trail on its path.

In Parral, three explosions were first heard, and several calls were made to the authorities inquiring about their origin. At the same time, in San José de los Bailón, eyewitnesses stated that they had seen a fireball crossing the sky "as if if had been fireworks, except that it was travelling in a downward trajectory!".

At the time of the sighting, a primary school was celebrating a graduation, and the children and parents present gave accounts of the "magnificent light show" they had witnessed.

In yet another town, Providencia, a family observed the phenomenon. José Luis Aguirre said that "it was like a shooting star, but brighter, and we saw this extremely bright light blaze across the sky from one end to the other. It was amazing."
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Fireball

Police camera films meteor fireball over West Midlands, UK


The Telegraph, UK
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 10:56 UTC
Image
A camera fitted to a West Midlands Police car films the moment a bright meteor shoots through the night sky

Police car cameras are usually used to catch images of suspects, but in the early hours of Monday morning West Midlands Police captured a meteor fireball shooting across the sky.

The video clip was taken from a traffic car while it was travelling towards Junction 4 of the M42 at Shirley just after 3am.

The meteor is believed to have broken into pieces as it entered the Earth's atmosphere and was visible across Wales and the west of England.


Comment:


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