Fireballs
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Fireball 3

Huge meteor fireball fragments over Queensland, Australia, 27 November 2013


lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com
Wed, 27 Nov 2013 16:13 UTC
Initial Meteor Sighting Reports

27 November 2013 Mark D Brisbane, Qld, AUSTRALIA 20:15 AEST (UTC+10)
9 seconds N-S Facing West Red main body with yellowish tail Venus Started as one moving light, fragmented into 2 clusters, larger cluster at the top, maybe 20-30 fragments, smaller cluster at the bottom, maybe 5-10 fragments awesome. scared the kids a little bit!
27 November 2013 Tiff Logan City, Qld, AUSTRALIA 1955
About 10 seconds. North-SouthWest Viewed facing west. Yellow/white. No sound. At least as big and bright as the moon. Started out big and solid then as it travelled it broke up into numerous smaller pieces that fizzled out. It was very, very low and fairly slow. I've never seen anything like it. Amazing!
27 November 2013 Delgray Mountain creek, Sunshine Coast, QLD Australia Between 7.30-8pm
10-15 seconds N/NE - S/SW White/yellow/gold, no sound Possibly the moon but a bit more yellow co,luring Yes, definitely fragmentation, 1 major part and the numerous trailing afterwards I am not sure what this was, defiantly had numerous fragments and wasn't moving too fast across the sky, but disappeared down to the SW of maybe Brisbane city, AUSTRALIA
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Fireball

What was that mysterious boom? Speculation of possible meteorite strike in western Quebec following overhead explosion, 26 November 2013


Montreal Gazette
Wed, 27 Nov 2013 07:37 UTC
Image
This file photo shows a meteorite in the sky above Russia’s Ural mountains on Feb. 15, 2013
All signs point to meteor event: Royal Astronomical Society of Canada

Montreal - Social media sites lit up Tuesday evening with reports that a meteorite may have been seen and heard in the Montreal and Ottawa regions.

Numerous people posted Twitter messages reporting a bright flash of blue light accompanied by the sound of a booming explosion just before 8 p.m. ET

Although there is no official conformation of a meteorite, a spokesman for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada says all signs point to a meteor event.

"I've heard of reports south of Ottawa, through Cornwall, the Montreal area, folks down in northern New York state as well, said Andrew Fazekas.

"It's really just observations from regular everyday folks that they heard a sonic boom that was preceded by a blue flash of light high in the sky that lasted maybe one or two seconds."

The Sûreté du Québec said they had received several calls about the event, but had not been able to pinpoint the source of the noise.
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Question

What was that boom over Montreal?


The Montreal Gazette
Tue, 26 Nov 2013 19:57 UTC
Montreal - Hudson and St-Lazare were rocked briefly by the sound of an explosion around 8 p.m. Tuesday, but the source of the big boom remains a mystery.

Officials in the off-island towns, as well as the Surêté du Québec, were flummoxed, leaving residents who heard the noise to wonder on Twitter what happened.

"No one seems to know what it is exactly but a friend described it as a bright blue flash in the sky followed by the sound," wrote Kalina Laframboise.

"It's been heard all over the region but no details," wrote Greg Patterson. "My opinion is that it was a meteor hitting the atmosphere with sonic boom."

Did you hear anything?
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Fireball

Asteroid whizzed by Earth today closer than anything else on NASA's Near Earth Object list

Dan Van Winkle
GeekoSystem
Tue, 26 Nov 2013 15:14 UTC

Asteroid 2013 NJ is just one object on NASA's list of near-Earth objects, but it's remarkable in that it flew by significantly closer than anything else on the list. Passing by at about 2.5 times the distance to the moon, it was close enough to be visible to the naked eye, even though its diameter is relatively small at 120-260 meters.

Luckily for us, when something passes extremely close in terms of space, say 2.5 lunar distances, it's actually still a pretty large distance away in actuality. Unluckily, the size of objects is also subjected to that relative sense of scale, as something that's relatively small in space terms, say 120-260 meters, is actually pretty large if it comes hurtling towards you.
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Fireball 5

Florida kid injured after meteorite hits him on the head

Karl Man
CBS 12 News
Tue, 26 Nov 2013 00:14 UTC
Image
© CBS12 Fragments of the meteorite that hit 7-year-old Floridian Steven Lippard on the head Saturday
Loxahatchee, Florida - He's the walking, talking, living, breathing seven-year-old who just had a very close encounter with outer space and has the scars to prove it. Steven Lippard was playing in his family's drive way this past Saturday when his world was rocked... literally.

"My dad ran to the door and saw me bleeding from the head", said Steven.

So what left little Steven with a gash in his head seemingly from out of nowhere, at first there were a lot of theories.

"I was thinking it could be a golf ball or a bird of prey", said Steven's dad Wayne.

But in the end the answer was in the palm of their hand.

"At that point I was convinced my son was hit by a meteorite", added Wayne.


Comment: The reporter assures us that meteorites have only hit the ground "4 times in Florida's history", which may or may not be the case. In the meantime, however, according to the American Meteor Society, there have been hundreds of reports of fragmenting fireballs seen overhead, and from around the world, in just the past few months alone, including dozens over Florida.

Officially, no one has ever been killed by a meteorite, but official history is, of course, bunk:

Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

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Meteor

Chelyabinsk meteor strike - a wake-up call for the world


Free Press Journal
Wed, 20 Nov 2013 00:23 UTC
Chelyabinsk meteorite
© Qing-zhu YinSlice of future shock: A fragment from the meteorite shows numerous veins from a long-ago impact shock that weakened the original object.
Consumer video cameras and advanced laboratory techniques gave scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February. The explosion was equivalent to about 600 thousand tonnes of TNT, 150 times bigger than the 2012 Sutter's Mill meteorite in California.

"If humanity does not want to go the way of the dinosaurs, we need to study an event like this in detail," says Qing-zhu Yin, professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at University of California, Davis.

Saying it was a "wake-up call," Yin says the Chelyabinsk meteorite, the largest strike since the Tunguska event of 1908, belongs to the most common type of meteorite, an "ordinary chondrite." If a catastrophic meteorite strike were to occur in the future, it would most likely be an object of this type.

"Our goal was to understand all circumstances that resulted in the damaging shock wave that sent over 1,200 people to hospitals in the Chelyabinsk blast area that day," says Peter Jenniskens, meteor astronomer at SETI Institute.
Their findings are published in the journal Science.

Based on viewing angles from videos of the fireball, researchers calculated that the meteoroid entered Earth's atmosphere at just over 19 kilometres per second, slightly faster than had previously been reported.
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Fireball 5

Just what was that 'thing in the sky' this morning in Oregon? Probably another fireball!

Brien Blakely
KPTV
Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:28 UTC
Fireball
© Ed Tynan
Portland - Three weeks after a fireball lit up the morning sky in the Pacific Northwest, the FOX 12 newsroom received several photos of objects passing through the sky above Oregon. One FOX 12 viewer wrote she noticed "a strange line in the sky" in Beaverton."As it continued down, the trail behind it started to spread out as you can see in the pictures. Then it lit up like a fireball," she wrote.

Another witness on Marine Drive said he spotted three objects in the sky around 7:15 a.m."I ran inside to grab my camera after I saw the first two and when I came out this one was breaching our atmosphere," he said. Jim Todd, OMSI's director space science education, says he's looking into the reports.


Comment: Several SOTT.net editors saw something very similar on October 27th:

Image
© SOTT.net
Nope, it wasn't a jet contrail:

Image
© SOTT.net


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Fireball

Now they tell us...Hazardous asteroids may be colliding with the planet 10 times more often than scientists have previously believed

Joel Achenbach
PressRepublican.com
Tue, 19 Nov 2013 13:29 UTC
Image
© NASAChelyabinsk rock
There are scads of building-size, potentially hazardous asteroids lurking in Earth's immediate neighborhood, and they may be colliding with the planet 10 times more often than scientists have previously believed, according to a new study published Wednesday that examined the airburst of a 25-million-pound asteroid earlier this year near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

Three studies released Wednesday, two in the journal Nature and one in the journal Science, have provided the most detailed description and analysis of the dramatic event on the morning of Feb. 15. Scientists now estimate the diameter of the object at just a hair under 20 meters, or about 65 feet. Undetected by astronomers, the rock came out of the glare of the sun and hit the atmosphere at 43,000 miles per hour.

As it descended through the atmosphere, it broke into fragments, creating a series of explosions with the combined energy of about 500 kilotons of TNT, making it more than 30 times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945, although the energy in this case was spread out over a much broader area.

The shock wave blew out windows in nearly half the buildings in Chelyabinsk. It knocked people off their feet; dozens were sunburned by the blinding flash, which at its peak was 30 times brighter than the sun. About 1,200 people were hurt, most by broken and flying glass, but no one was killed.

Comment: Here's a great book that sheds even more light on this 'ongoing problem', Laura Knight-Jadczyk's latest:

Comets and the Horns of Moses

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Fireball 5

Comets cause spectacular sight in Oklahoma sky

Richard Clark
NewsOn6.com
Mon, 18 Nov 2013 10:50 UTC

Tulsa, Oklahoma - People across Oklahoma are being treated to an amazing sight in the night sky, thanks to two comets, one familiar and one that's brand new.

The familiar one is causing the Leonid meteor shower. The shower happens every year when Earth passes through the tail of Comet Tempel-Tuttle, which was first discovered in 1865.

This year people across Oklahoma and bordering states have reported seeing brilliant meteors crashing toward Earth thanks to the Leonids. They're called that because they appear to radiate from a point in the Leo the Lion constellation.
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Fireball 4

Meteor fireball glowed so brightly over Oklahoma and Texas, residents reported 'plane crashed into Lake Texoma'

Alexandra Carter
News 12 KXII
Mon, 18 Nov 2013 09:25 UTC
Image
Lake Texoma on the border of Oklahoma and Texas
Lake Texoma -- Bryan County residents and first responders were in for a scare Saturday night when they received reports of a plane crashing into Lake Texoma.

Grayson County received a 91-1 call last night reporting a plane crashing into Lake Texoma. After investigating, authorities found what appeared to be a fiery crash may have been a meteor falling from the sky.

When the Grayson County Sheriff's Office received a 9-11 call Saturday night reporting a plane engulfed in flames crashing into Lake Texoma. A mutli-agency investigation was launched.

According to Deputy Vinny Cacace, " Bryan County Sheriff's Office, Cartwright, Colbert fire, Colbert Police Department, Lighthorse Police Department, Emergency Management, Denison Fire of course launched on their side and Grayson County, Marshall County did the same as well."

The responding agencies used all resources available to them to locate the reported plane.
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