'April Fireballs' days - Ball of Fire (meteor) blazes across San Antonio, TX sky

sounds corny but thats what astronomers apparently termed the mysterious Spring phenomenon.

"For reasons astronomers don't understand, they occur in April" - newscaster below

this video and comment too it, LOL who knows...

Yes it happens every year yet at 30 years old this is the first I have heard of it and I have followed this stuff all my life. They really think we are stupid dont they?

We had one across New Zealand just last week - something's not right and we all know it!!

second line

reply to post by BiggerPicture


What was shown in the video isn't a meteor, it's a jet contrail being illuminated by the sun.

Also, here's an article about the April fireball season...

phys.org...

Bit early for the Lyrids.
Mind you I saw one a couple of weeks ago. Couldn't exactly say my reaction was WTF FIREBALL, but it was quite a cool sight. Happened to be looking at Orion at the time and it streaked across the belt.

My husband and I saw also one last week - night time display with a long trail behind it. I've never seen anything quite like it. It burned out/disappeared as we were watching it. Moments later we saw 2 more shooting "objects" and the night after that we saw several more "shooting stars". Very active 2 nights in a row. We're in SW Virginia near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Game of Thrones...the Dragons are coming......

Des

reply to post by BiggerPicture
Didnt jesus say when you see the stars fall to earth or something to that effect time is near. I know they alwatys fall but I guess if it becomes more frequent wessss in trouble!!!!!!!!!

ok .. I don't think a FIREBALL screaming out of the sky toward a town near you .. is .........PRETTY COOL~! as the female reporter stated..

I see NOTHING cool about this.. ! Yea.. just another FIREBALL screaming toward earth ...all is well .. (except when it impacts at 10x times the speend of sound) and in other news today..

600 dolphins just beached themselves.. it happens all the time.. every year.. and in other news today ..

is ALL OF is that common .. ?? seriously ?? How many FIREBALLS streaking out of the sky have you seen or even HEARD of personally in the last 10 years.. ????

me personally... in the last 3 years.. I've heard a hell of alot more than I've heard EVER in the last 30 years..

reply to post by Komodo


Wow! you seem very stressed. Take a breath and calm down before you become the next fireball in the latest breaking news thread. Meteors enter the atmosphere quite often and are not the cause of mass dolphin deaths.
A member a few posts above yours even stated it may be a contrail illuminated by the sun. However, I have to disagree that it was a contrail though. It looks more like some kind of debris (possibly a satellite) breaking up as it enters the atmosphere but that's just my 2 cents. I can tell you what it isn't though and I'm positive about this.......
It's not the end of the world.

Originally posted by Chadwickus
reply to post by BiggerPicture

 

What was shown in the video isn't a meteor, it's a jet contrail being illuminated by the sun.

I agree.

I think it should also be noted, that there was a real meteor reported.

Reports posted on The American Meteor Society web site (see event 493) are consistent with a natural meteor/fireball. Many of the reports said it lasted around 1 second - nothing like the "meteor" footage in the news report.

It's also not unusual for news reports to be wrong or misleading, like this one was.

Also amazing to see that the video report with the first link, makes that odd
mistake again that I never understand: they show footage (unrelated to the real
April 3 event) of a "fireball" that in reality shows: an aircraft contrail. It
keeps surprising me that in this day and age, people don't recognize aircraft
contrails for what they are.

- Marco

-----
Dr Marco (asteroid 183294) Langbroek
Dutch Meteor Society (DMS)

Source: meteorobs mailing list

Originally posted by Chadwickus
reply to post by BiggerPicture

 

What was shown in the video isn't a meteor, it's a jet contrail being illuminated by the sun.

Also, here's an article about the April fireball season...

phys.org...

Yep I noticed the NEWS used a youtube clip of all things. their bad judgment

in your referenced article, the scientist says "It's not only fireballs that are affected. Meteorite falls--space rocks that actually hit the ground--are more common in spring as well."

what are the fireballs? i thought fireballs are early unidentified meteors, in most all case. is that not so?

just wondering, for who knows, as the scientists made me thing they are something different than meteorites by his wording and sequence.

reply to post by BiggerPicture


Fireballs are just any meteor or meteorite that burn/flare up as they enter the atmosphere.

Originally posted by Komodo
is ALL OF is that common .

Regarding fireballs...

Yes, to put it bluntly, although daylight fireballs are very rare to observe, but not because they are rare, but because they can easily go unnoticed. To be seen in daylight, a fireball must be quite bright, enough to overcome the brightness of the sky.

We know fireballs are common, and that they were even more common in the past. There is a virtually unlimited supply of fireball material known as the Asteroid Belt that will ensure that we will be seeing fireballs for the foreseeable future, and we also have cometary material from the Oort cloud on top of that.

There may be a number of other reasons why you might think fireballs were more common:

1/ On a forum like ATS you tend to hear about local news stories more than you would otherwise.

2/ Fireballs generally don't make the news unless there is something "newsworthy" (it gets ratings), such as it was an unusually big one seen by many many people, or as in this case it was a rare daylight fireball, or if it was caught on camera. Since there are many more cameras than there were just a few years ago, we are seeing more of these type of events making the news.

Originally posted by Komodo
How many FIREBALLS streaking out of the sky have you seen or even HEARD of personally in the last 10 years.. ????

In the last 10 years I've personally seen dozens of fireballs, but that is mainly because I spend a lot of time observing during meteor shower peaks. If you had said "the last 15 years" then it would be in the hundreds, perhaps even over 1000. That is in the strict definition of the word "fireball" though.

Most of the fireballs I have seen were the result of cometary debris streams, where as most big fireballs that make the news tend to be of asteroidal origin, since they are slower and tend to penetrate deeper into the atmosphere/last longer, and therefore tend to be more widely seen in terms of individual large scale events.

Originally posted by Komodo
me personally... in the last 3 years.. I've heard a hell of alot more than I've heard EVER in the last 30 years..

So that would be around the time you registered on ATS - see "reason 1" above.

I think you need to calm down, and look at this subject in a rational manner. Our atmosphere is very good at stopping small asteroids (the main cause of medium-large fireballs), and large ones that can cause damage on a global scale are too rare to pose an immediate threat. Many of the large ones have been found, so no longer pose a real threat.

References:
The American Meteor Society Fireball FAQs

Originally posted by Chadwickus
Fireballs are just any meteor or meteorite that burn/flare up as they enter the atmosphere.

Sorry Chad, but that is not right at all.

A fireball is a meteor that is brighter than usual. It's generally agreed that any meteor that is brighter than -4 magnitude (the brightness of Venus as it appears in the night sky) is considered to be a fireball.

A meteor is what we see when a meteoroid enters our atmosphere and becomes self-luminous due to the collisions with atmospheric gas molecules, which create a glowing cloud of plasma that surrounds the meteoroid.

Any meteor is by definition "self-luminous", but there is no "burning". There is not enough oxygen at these altitudes to support combustion. The process whereby matter is stripped from the surface of the meteoroid is known as "ablation".

If anything survives, and makes it to the ground, it's known as a meteorite.

how is this not normal, or new in any way? it's been happening for billions of years.

so it starts happening more, something is wrong? we are on a planet people, do you forget that sometimes?

reply to post by FireballStorm


Thanks for the correction mate.



You have obviously been studying them for some time?

reply to post by Chadwickus


My pleasure Chad.

Studying, observing, reading meteor/fireball reports, and trying to photograph them for nearly 15 years now. I've even traveled to your outback to observe a meteor storm when the Leonids were "storm mode" back in November 2001.

Now it's "just a jet contrail"....WTF?! how do you go from "april fireball season" to "just a jet contrail?" What I find most interesting is seeing the machine at work of how the talking head newscasters manage to throw almost every insult they can towards the UFO community and those who question the new official "explanation"

reply to post by Voldemorton

What I find most interesting is seeing the machine at work of how the talking head newscasters manage to throw almost every insult they can towards the UFO community and those who question the new official "explanation"

And what I find funny is why they even need to bring up UFOs at all!

I am sorry but this whole thing is extremely ridiculous. And to believe that what that is is a jet contrail. A quote from an article YESTERDAY:

According to NASA, 30 years of observations show that there's a consistent uptick in the number of fireballs — meteors that glow brighter than the planets as they scorch through Earth's atmosphere — during the spring compared with other times of the year. "There are two peaks: one around February and the other at the end of March and early April," said Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "And this remains a mystery."

Source

NASA has been observing this phenomena for 30 YEARS!!!!

I personally have never heard of this before. So seeing an article yesterday about the frequency of fireballs in the daytime sky in Texas intrigued me. And I was completely ready to believe that NASA was right in saying they were meteors.

And then today...

A bright object that streaked across the Texas sky during the day April 4, originally believed to be a meteor burning up as it entered Earth's atmosphere, was actually a flying jet and its contrail, a NASA scientist has confirmed.
Local news stations reported that the bright object was a fireball (an especially bright meteor) and Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, initially said it was indeed a fireball, and more evidence of the mysterious and unexplained observation that there are more fireballs in the spring than other times of the year. However, other experts argued that the Texas fireball was actually a jet contrail reflecting the glow of the setting sun, making it appear fiery.

Source

So....

What I am reading is that Bill Cooke saw the footage of the fireball streaking in the sky, saw that it was similar if not identical to what they have been observing for 30 YEARS!!!

The footage from a YouTube video gets the attention of news sources in Texas, and OVERNIGHT Bill Cooke, a NASA SCIENTIST, retracts his previous statements.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just an airplane.

I am starting to understand how people felt the morning they woke up and read that a UFO that crashed in some podunk town in New Mexico the day before was really just a weather balloon.