reply to post by FoxMulder91
Sorry It took me a while to get back here.
Im not an expert on meteors or fireballs, so im not sure if whats being described is one of those or something different.
I listened, and what I heard is consistent with a bright meteor.
Its going up ?
Isnt that strange ?
IS someone leaving for some reason ?
It's not strange at all, since the direction a meteor will appear to travel depends on where on Earth you observe it from. Remember, although they
can seem to be low, meteors are only luminous above 40 km altitude (perhaps 20-25 km in rare cases). Since they are so high up, they can be seen for
many hundreds of miles, and since Earth is curved, someone just over the horizon can see it going in one direction, while you see it going in the
other.
This diagram shows what's going on. It's slightly exaggerated in order to prove my point.
A and B are observing the same meteor entering our atmosphere, separated by hundreds of miles. The red lines represent their respective lines of
sight, and the colors in the meteor represent the altitude, green being high, and red being low, just as it is in real life with cometary meteor
showers like the Leonids and Perseids.
To observer A, the meteor appears to fly up from the horizon, whilst the same meteor seen by observer B would appear to fall towards the ground.
Here you can find footage from other locations of the same event (scroll
down), at least I think it was, but in any case it demonstrates how different a meteor can appear due to perspective, as well as how misleading the
apparent direction can be.
Colours can vary, depending on what the Meteor is made of and what is burning off, they can have many different metals in them that changes the
colour as they burn up, kind of like fireworks they use different powdered metals in some to change their colours.
In fact I think green is the common colour for Meteors, at least for me anyhow.
Actually meteors do not "burn", and the green color seen in most green meteors is usually due to
oxygen, although in the slower meteors (like the one in question here) it may be due to
elements
ablated from the meteor.
Color in meteors is actually very subjective, and everyone perceives the colors in meteors a little differently, hence why reports of the same event
can vary a bit. Our eyes are most sensitive to green light, so it makes sense that meteors often appear to be green, out of all the wavelengths
present in meteor spectra.
