I asked last Saturday evening after Meade and I saw a spectacular light streak across the northern sky, east to west.
Reader MadisonMan checked to see if the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center rooftop webcams had caught it, and isn't it cool that they caught the view we saw:
So there! A meteor! Beautiful!
February 11, 2016
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16 comments:
Thanks MadMan!
I believe its called a bolide.
Thanks, MM!
In other science news, gravitational waves have been detected!
I think the Astronomy Picture of the Day presentation is good because they show the signals from the WA and LA LIGO sites overlapped, but here's an article with a little more meat on it:
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160211
Huh. The way you described it, i thought it was going to illuminate all of Madison- more meh!
That's meteoric.
I believe its called a bolide.
Yes it is.
I saw a huge one from my back porch in a suburb NE of Atlanta just a little before dusk. (still very light out) Spewing green sparks and angrily traveling towards the northeast.
Since this was before the Internet (1992), I had to wait until a few days later I saw where a car had been struck in Peekskill, NY.
The meteor reported here Sunday has been designated AMS event 496-2016 with 23 reports on file:
http://www.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/event/2016/496
On that report page click "With observation directions" and zoom in and you can get a pretty good fix on the object's trajectory across Wisconsin and Iowa.
The fisheye lens distorts the horizontal too much to be sure, but the length of the tail, i.e. virtually no tail at all, suggests that was what meteor watchers call an Earth-grazer, in other words a body, such as a asteroid, that passes through the upper atmosphere and then back into space.
@ Quaestor -
Sounds like a perferct description of Bernie Sanders...
Thanks, Bob. Mine is the 24th report.
Look. I've seen this before. In the movies.
It damn well could have been a spaceship chock-full of aliens, or its unearthly radiation emissions could have raised the dead. And you know what? Those small-yield nuclear devices the UFO's carry aren't really that small-yield, not when one bursts a thousand meters over your head.
Man, if I'd seen something like that, I would have grabbed my bugout bag and hightailed it for the Madeline Islands. You might have a fighting chance, there.
Way to go, MM
I saw something similar just south of Madison in about 1993. Whatever it was went behind a cloud and there was a green flash.
Saw a vivid meteor shower while sitting on a darkened cannery loading dock in Milton-Freewater in 1978. Spent the next 30 years telling everyone they were UFOs.
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