Blogs / Bad Astronomy

A little while back, a bright fireball lit up the evening sky in Utah. There was a repeat performance just last week, on November 21, this time in South Africa. A CCTV camera captured the dramatic scene:

If you happened to see this fireball and got footage, the local news wants to see it. The more footage that’s available, the better scientists can understand the meteoroid that burned up, including getting a trajectory and possibly even an orbit for it.

I’ll add that the Utah and African events are almost certainly unrelated; they happened days apart. At orbital speeds, that means the two objects were probably millions of kilometers apart in space, and so most likely coincidental.

[For those complaining about my title, I said "midwest" because the meteor was seen as far east as Colorado, which sits on the west/midwest border, and, duh, I needed a word that started with "M".]

By now you’ve probably heard of the extremely bright fireball over Utah last Wednesday, proving once again that really cool stuff happens when I’m on travel and can’t write about it. Worse, it was seen from Denver, which means I might’ve had a shot at seeing it myself.

Sigh.

Anyway, this meteor was so bright it overexposed security cameras, turned night into day, and cast obvious shadows on the ground. This video shows several different views of it:

Whoa.

The coolest thing about these videos is, to me, the way the shadows of objects move rapidly around as the meteor flashes across the sky. I describe this very thing in the opening vignette of the asteroid impact chapter of my book Death from the Skies! The video is pretty much exactly as I imagined it would be. Yikes.

Of course, not everyone thinks this was just a chunk of rock burning up harmlessly in our atmosphere. Because, after all, why assume it was a natural event that occurs quite often, when you can add layers of nonsense and conspiracy to it? Fark alerted me to the idea that this was actually a nuclear missile shot down over the US, despite the video, pictures, and eyewitness accounts completely contradicting the idea that this was anything other than a meteor. But for some people, facts won’t get in the way of a good story!

Anyway, while spectacular, the Earth is probably subjected to meteors like this several times a year. As I have said before, now that we have security cameras and phones with video, we’ll be seeing more and more of videos like this, which is a good thing: it’ll make people more aware of the sky. I’m all for that!