Fireballs
A video was uploaded to YouTube:
A fireball streaked across the Abu Dhabi sky on Friday evening. According to the International Astronomy Centre (ISC), it was spotted at 6.32pm and lit the evening sky for about four seconds.
It was detected by the ISC's UAE Meteor Monitoring Network. "The centre is analysing whether a part of the fireball reached the ground."
Fireball is another term for a very bright meteor.
According to the American Meteor Society, the fireball was reported by at least 32 people at around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Witnesses reported seeing the fireball in southern, central and northwestern Minnesota, eastern North Dakota and Manitoba.
One witness wrote "Unlike anything I have ever seen." Another report said the meteor had a "spark trail" as it fell from the sky.
The organization says several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth's atmosphere each day. The vast majority occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions.
Believed to be the first of its kind installed in Montana, the All Sky Fireball Camera System is capable of giving a 3D atmospheric trajectory of meteors as well as their velocity, magnitude, pre-atmospheric mass estimate for the meteoroid and determine the orbit of the meteoroid prior to hitting Earth.
MLC director Ryan Hannahoe says they were lucky to catch the fireball: "We just set up the camera system and focused the camera on the night of the twenty-ninth and it just so happened about five or six hours later we captured that fireball," said Hannahoe. "So that was beginner's luck, as they call it."
This bright meteor was recorded in the framework of the SMART project, operated by the Southwestern Europe Meteor Network (SWEMN) from the meteor-observing stations located at Sevilla, La Sagra (Granada), and La Hita (Toledo). The event has been analyzed by the principal investigator of the SMART project: Dr. Jose M. Madiedo, from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC).
"The whole apartment shook so I was pretty confused. I didn't know what was going on," said Rita Langston of Henderson.
That's the mystery that has the Tri-State talking as we start off the new year. What was that boom? It even took social media by storm with comments rolling in on a post made on the Henderson Watch Facebook page.
"Some of them were saying they heard it in Newburgh, in Evansville, and on the south side of Henderson," Langston said.
They found nothing, just like Muskego police. Instead, they may have witnessed a relatively rare weather phenomenon.
Just after noon on Sunday, the noise ruffled some feathers in southeastern Wisconsin.
"I was watching TV and then I heard a really loud boom," said Michelle Bykowski. "Kinda sounded like something happened in my garage, like it collapsed or something."
From Waukesha to Franklin, Caledonia to Wind Lake, Wisconsinites took to Facebook, asking if others heard a loud booming noise -- like an explosion...
The flash was captured in home surveillance video from Feickert Drive.
The Elk Grove Police Department said the incident is just one example of loud booms people have been reporting for weeks.
"We both jumped out of bed because one of the pictures fell from the wall," said Amy Mantanane.
Two videos were uploaded to the AMS website.
Credit: Jason Sewell.