Update: I had an image here, but evidently it’s not of the space debris in question, so I removed it.
From Digg (via Digger and BABloggee John Huntington) comes the news that an extremely bright object burned up over Croatia. That site has a video with brief footage of the bolide, including one near the end where the object calved (split). It’s pretty cool.
Unfortunately, I don’t speak Croatian, so I have no idea what they’re saying on the video (any BABloggees from that area, feel free to translate in the comments). I hardly need to, since the footage itself is so amazing.
One thing– it says the fireball was at magnitude -20, but I’m not convinced. That’s about 1% of the Sun’s brightness, and the object didn’t look that bright. Brighter than the Moon, maybe, but not anywhere near even a percent of the Sun, at least in that footage.
I wonder how big the object was? It may have been about the size of a car, I’d guess, given the brightness. It wasn’t breaking up in the footage except for that one calving event, so it may have been metallic (rocky bodies tend to disintegrate, like in the famous Peekskill meteorite footage). Hard to say. Also hard to say if it hit the ground or not. Maybe they talk about that in the video.
Still, amazing, and a nice prelude to the Perseids coming up in a few days (more about them later this week).
July 30th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Amazing footage. I wish I could understand the
language.
July 30th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Cool!! I can’t imagine, however, that -20 would allow the camera to see adjacent cloud color and red stop lights.
July 30th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
The picture above is actually a stock photo. Apparently it’s from the meteor event above Mexico.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8mbA606ZRWI
July 30th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Fantastic footage!
Some english info can be found here:
http://spaceweather.com/
July 30th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
I suppose it has been established by now that it’s indeed a meteor or some other natural object from outer space, and not a satellite or piece of space junk or even a missile test…
Hmm.. maybe I should double check that I can still watch all the TV channels.
July 30th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Link from the picture is hosed. You added the badastronomy site to the front.
July 30th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Here is a rough translation of the clip. My Serbo-Croatian is not so great anymore, but here is the jist of it. My apologies if I have horribly mangled it
I will ask my Croatian friend to help me translate it tomorrow:
Male anchor: An unusual sighting was seen in the sky above Croatia. In the middle of the day, a celestial event brightened the sky. Many residents were surprised by this rare natural event.
Female voiceover: The celestial object was about 80 km above earth and seen by many all over Croatia. Firefighters in Sibenik and local residents were left amazed. Residents of Zagreb saw the fireball and heard an explosion [unintelligible to me].
Ante: This was, if I can say, an amazing bolide, a super bolide, which was seen in the sky as a ball of fire. Even more amazing was that it was visible by day.
Female voiceover: Because of the daylight, neither the observatories nor the radar were able to record this event. The appearance of a bolide has not been witnessed in years.
Ante: It is very important if people have video footage of this event to show us, so we can locate where the meteorite exploded and where it landed, especially the cameras near [unintelligible to me].
Female voiceover: The experts haven’t recorded a presence of a bolide in years.
Prof Korado Korlevic: Those brilliant firey spheres, that we can see even in competition with the light from the sun, are fairly rare. About 10 years ago, a meteorite fell near Dubrovnik, and that one was about as bright as this one.
Female voiceover: Luckily, this only flew above Croatia.
July 30th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Unfortunately, and if I’m not mistaken, the brief clip at the beginning of the Croatian TV footage seems to be of the 9/23/06 Guadalajara, Mexico bolide. The same clip can be viewed on YouTube, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbA606ZRWI&mode=related&search=
July 30th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
I’m half Croatian, and my family comes from Sibenik. Unfortunatley I don’t speak a word of the language so I wouldn’t be much help in translating.
I’d be curious to know more about which direction it was heading, towards the coast or otherwise. Sibenik is on the coast so if it hit land it’d have to be moving in an easterly direction-I think.
July 30th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
I am amazed that so many cameras happened to capture this fast-moving object. I am also amazed at the apparent calm of the spectators. I, for one. would be running in circles while keeping my eyes fixed on the bolide, waving my hands over my head and spouting unintelligible gibberish.
(I actually did that once, when I observed a bolide over Delaware in January of 1990. I was torn between watching the bolide and running back into the laundromat I had just walked out of to tell everyone to come out and see this amazing thing. In the end I settled for running up to random people in the parking lot, pointing into the sky, and shouting “LOOK! LOOK!” Generally speaking, they did not.)
July 30th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Anyone who’s lucky enough to have seen one of these things has witnessed one of the most amazing sights the night (or, I guess, day) sky ever shows. I got to see one at the Strawberry Music Festival a number of years ago. In the middle of Peter Rowan’s mystical chant in ‘Land of the Navaho’ a fireball way brighter and larger than Venus streaked directly overhead in the pitch-black Sierra Nevada sky, broke up into maybe six or eight pieces, all still Venus-like in brightness, and they all vanished, all in the span of maybe ten or twelve seconds. What a lightshow!! The altitude, the dark sky, the music, and the, um, atmosphere (literally and figuratively) and the magnificance of this celestial event awed true believers and believers in the truth alike.
Hallelujah!
July 30th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
That last shot in the footage, showing the “calving” event, looks fake to me. The flash doesn’t seem to cause any camera imager artifacts and the smoke trail doesn’t quite seem to track correctly with the camera movement.
July 30th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Very good translation…minor additions…
Male anchor: An unusual sighting was seen in the sky above Croatia. In the middle of the day, a celestial event brightened the sky. Many residents were surprised by this rare natural event.
Female voiceover: The celestial object was about 80 km above earth and seen by many all over Croatia. Firefighters in Sibenik and local residents were left amazed. Residents of Zagreb saw the fireball and heard an explosion [[b]that sounded like a loud thunder[/b]].
Ante: This was, if I can say, an amazing bolide, a super bolide, which was seen in the sky as a ball of fire. Even more amazing was that it was visible by day.
Female voiceover: Because of the daylight, neither the observatories nor the radar were able to record this event. The appearance of a bolide has not been witnessed in years.
Ante: It is very important if people have video footage of this event to show us, so we can locate where the meteorite exploded and where it landed, especially the cameras near [[b]Jastrebarski[/b]].
Female voiceover: The experts haven’t recorded a presence of a bolide in years.
Prof Korado Korlevic: Those brilliant firey spheres, that we can see even in competition with the light from the sun, are fairly rare. About [b]60[/b] years ago, a meteorite fell near Dubrovnik, and that one was about as bright as this one.
Female voiceover: Luckily, this only flew above Croatia.
July 30th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
Still image at 0:41 seconds is the only one captured in Croatia. Other images are from other similar events captured on camera.
July 30th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
When I said “amazing”, before, I really meant “kinda suspicious”. So do we know for sure that this is a legitimate event, and not publicity for an upcoming Croatian science-fiction epic? Or maybe for Cloverfield?
July 30th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Aah – beaten to the translations. A colleague just translated it roughly for me. Only addition to the above is that it may have been 60 years since last bolide over Croatia.
July 31st, 2007 at 1:50 am
“Because of the daylight, neither the observatories nor the radar were able to record this event.” This doesn’t seem right – daylight doesn’t keep radars from working, otherwise airports would have a big problem on their hands each day. Plus, Jodrell Bank observatory observed meteors during the daylight using radar back in the 1950s (see http://www.springerlink.com/content/n320280l01518847/ , or google something like “jodrell bank daylight meteor” if you don’t have journal access). Not to mention all the people who listen to meteors with amateur equipment nowadays…
Still, impressive-looking footage.
July 31st, 2007 at 2:02 am
Wow.
July 31st, 2007 at 2:09 am
Wow! Far too slow – a couple of translators already so I don’t need to do it now. I hope more information comes out about the veracity of it all, considering others are noticing some montage of the video.
July 31st, 2007 at 6:25 am
From what I Read on spaceweather, the fireball shown in the movie is not the real thing.
July 31st, 2007 at 7:47 am
So basically, the -20 magnitude hasn’t been proven or disproven yet. Hope to see more data!
July 31st, 2007 at 7:48 am
OK, I live in Croatia and I thought I’d chime in on this one. First of all, all that footage you saw is as far as I know either CGI or archival footage of a different fireball. To my knowledge no video of the bolide has surfaced yet, but it was said to to at around noon so that clip is obviously unrelated. Reporters here have a tendency to do that just so they have something to show. A couple of additional notes: eyewitnesses say it indeed was too bright to look at for more than a couple of moments and there were apparently loud sonic booms heard over Zagreb (in the general area the bolide was flying over). I still can’t believe I missed that one – nevermind seeing it when you’re at work, but hearing it…
The last thing about that report that pi$$ed me off is the “lucky it flew over us” part, as if having a meteorite land near you is a BAD thing… The last meteorite that fell here was near the town of Dubrovnik some 60 years ago, this one might have actually crashed somewhere in Slovenia.
July 31st, 2007 at 8:39 am
What are the chances that this bolide will wake people up to the fact that Earth is essentially target practice for these objects? Imagine the reaction from the US Government if this had happened to strike, say… the Sears Tower, or the Kansas City stockyards, or midtown Dallas…
Do we really think that GWB wouldn’t use that as a causus belli to ‘retaliate’ against, say, Iran?
July 31st, 2007 at 9:33 am
Thank you Khazar and Gordan for pointing out that the footage was mostly or completely unrelated to this event! My skeptic radar must have been turned off. I feel completely duped. Really makes me think long and hard about US media and how many, many times I must have been duped in my life. I’ll have to show this to my kids…
July 31st, 2007 at 9:39 am
Has there been any follow up by local astronomers?
July 31st, 2007 at 9:49 am
Well, Prof. Korado Korlevic and Ante Radonic mentioned earlier are urging eyewitnesses that have videos of the event to send them as they’d be helpful in analysis and triangulation. I don’t expect much personally, people here don’t walk around with video cameras or look at the sky. Mostly it’s the latter
As for any cellphone video clips, I’m not sure how useful those would be.
July 31st, 2007 at 11:19 am
To me the video show unrelated events, all seem atmospheric reentries of space junk orbiting our planet. The speed seems to be somewhat low compared with what you expect from a real meteor. You should check data with reentry predictions from Space-Track.
July 31st, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Thank you khazar for the corrections! Yes, I wasn’t sure if it was 10 or 60 years, the annoucer said it so fast.
During the broadcast, they never *specifically* say that any of the footage show is of the actual meteorite that flew over Croatia. They may have just been showing footage of what meteors look like for the television audience and they never mentioned the sources of the footage. And since the newscaster does say that they hope anyone with footage comes forward, I will assume that none of those shown in the broadcast are of the recent “Croatian Bolide.”
July 31st, 2007 at 12:52 pm
From Mike Peel: ““Because of the daylight, neither the observatories nor the radar were able to record this event.†This doesn’t seem right – daylight doesn’t keep radars from working, otherwise airports would have a big problem on their hands each day. Plus, Jodrell Bank observatory observed meteors during the daylight using radar back in the 1950s (see http://www.springerlink.com/content/n320280l01518847/ , or google something like “jodrell bank daylight meteor†if you don’t have journal access). Not to mention all the people who listen to meteors with amateur equipment nowadays…”
I may have mistranslated radar, it didn’t make sense to me either…. I need to double-check that.
Oh, and thank you for pointing that out Khazar, that still image is the only one caught of the meteorite. However, I am confused, why is the background dark in that photo if it passed in the daytime? I haven’t studied astronomy or photography in years, so it could just be a lack of knowledge on my part.
July 31st, 2007 at 4:38 pm
RomRod, the bolide I saw in Delaware in January 1990 was about as bright as Venus and was moving across the sky with the same apparent speed as (or a little bit faster than) a passenger jet at a typical cruising altitude. It was also leaving a trail behind it, though it didn’t persist long. It didn’t zip across the sky as fast as some fireballs I’ve seen, and was much slower than the garden-variety meteor.
July 31st, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Ana:
“I may have mistranslated radar, it didn’t make sense to me either…. I need to double-check that.
Oh, and thank you for pointing that out Khazar, that still image is the only one caught of the meteorite. However, I am confused, why is the background dark in that photo if it passed in the daytime? I haven’t studied astronomy or photography in years, so it could just be a lack of knowledge on my part.”
——
No, you were correct to translate “Because of the daylight (bright sun), neither the observatories nor the radar(s) were able to record this event.” That’s what they said even though radars aren’t affected by the sunlight as stated above. I have to say that the whole report was very confusing. Also, the still image they show (caught by surveillance camera) appears to be taken at night, not in the middle of the day as they claim.
July 31st, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Is there a good way to tell that what we were seeing is harmless and not something on the order of the asteroid that caused the Tungusta Event?
August 1st, 2007 at 6:06 am
The still at 41s is not of the Croatian fireball. It is an image made of a bright Leonid fireball which appeared over Norway during the storm of 17-18 November 1999. If you look closely at the image you can identify Orion at the left, a constellation not even visible at the time.
I suppose they found the image here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap991202.html
Considering it was a daytime fireball the dark background with stars should have removed any doubt…
Koen
August 1st, 2007 at 8:23 am
I just wanted to correct the above translations a bit. Ante Radonić didn’t say they’re urging people with video footage to some forward but that the survaillance camera footage needs to be examined as those cameras would’ve been the only ones that could capture the bolide (especially in area near Jastrebarsko). Also, as previously mentioned the clip in news report is unrelated to this sightig as NovaTV admitted the footage is archive.
While I live in Å ibenik I hadn’t the luck of seeing it myself.
August 1st, 2007 at 11:40 am
Koen said:
The still at 41s is not of the Croatian fireball. It is an image made of a bright Leonid fireball which appeared over Norway during the storm of 17-18 November 1999. If you look closely at the image you can identify Orion at the left, a constellation not even visible at the time.
I suppose they found the image here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap991202.html
Considering it was a daytime fireball the dark background with stars should have removed any doubt…
—-
Nice find. The report lost all its credibility as far as I’m concerned. I watched it again, and it says: “…only surveillance cameras were able to record this light”, and then they show that picture.
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:57 am
I’m a little surprised many of you think (or at least claim to believe) these are genuine. To me the last shot, with the split especially,is an obvious fake; it even features a rather fabricated focusing sequence and camera shake. I’ve worked with some software used for making such particle effects before and some of those videos looked strikingly familiar to me. The lens flares are a little exaggerated too, especially for most cameras available to the public. Some images (especially the stills) may be genuine, but I believe a little bit more skepticism is in order.
There’s plenty a YouTube comment like this where it shouldn’t be, but I find this particular set a little unconvincing. I wonder whether this is a joke on your part or whether a news agency actually fell for ‘it’.
August 2nd, 2007 at 6:22 am
dr. adrian: “I wonder whether this is a joke on your part or whether a news agency actually fell for ‘it’.”
Fell for what? Are you implying the news agency had no knowledge they were broadcasting unrelated footage? As I said before, they do that all the time (at least this TV network) here in Croatia and I’m not a bit surprised. Yes, what they should be doing is clearly marking such footage as unrelated or even false. I’ve already stated before that it’s highly unlikely any of that footage was related in any way – one was footage I had already seen before, one is obviously faked as you say and one is a nighttime still image. It surprises me therefore when people continue arguing whether the footage is real or not AND from those conclusions they infer if the bolide was real or not.
As for the report of the actual bolide, I assure you if it didn’t happen, they wouldn’t be reporting about it. Astronomically related stuff isn’t that popular here to get airtime without a good enough reason.
August 4th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
NONE of the footage shown shows the fireball in question.
The footage at 00:10-00:16s in the video is not a fireball at all. It is months old footage shot in Mexico and shows a fighter jet with it’s afterburner on (you can see the dark shape of the fighter jet on some moments during the footage if you look careful).
The still at 00:41s in the video already was commented on above, it’s an older photograph of another fireball
The footage between 1:00-1:28 in the video is computer animation, from a Spanish ad campaign if I am not mistaken
The only footage I cannot identify is the still at 00:36s, but it looks very doubtful/artificial and not like a bolide.
August 12th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
[...] without trying particularly hard I saw about a dozen meteors, including a couple of near-bolides. I saw a few meteors as Perseus rose on Friday night, too, and we’ll probably see more tonight as [...]
August 13th, 2007 at 6:24 am
The footage you see in that Croatian video is ARCHIVE FOOTAGE – meaning its not the footage of the Super Bolide that fell in Slovenia on 25th July! No videos of this event were captured, but Slovenian experts are now gathering info to help them find the place where the particle of the bolide crashed into…