Daytime Fireball, Oct. 3 2004

Can anyone confirm some sort of object falling as a fireball about 2:40p eastern time? She says that she saw a very large fireball in the SSW sky about 15 minutes ago. She watched it drop straight to the horizon while leaving a large trail/tail. It took about 5 minutes to disappear behing the treeline. I missed the thing, but she gave me a blow-by-blow observation.

I have not seen anything online or on TV yet.

What location was it? It may have been one of a few things: an Irridium Flare, the ISS flying over, a bolloid (meteor breaking up in the atmosphere leaving severeal bright fireballs), or a sattellite breaking up.

Oh, sorry. I forgot location. Seen from Philadelphia, PA. I was guessing satellite re-enty. The wife & I have made a habit of catching Iridium flares, so she had that to compare it to & said it was very different in that it left a trail and 'fell' toward the horizon.

Thanks for the quick reply!

edit: spelling

[edit on 3-10-2004 by Spectre]

Can't find anything yet, still looking. Did it look like this one that was in South Wales?

I love that S. Wales photo. There is a good ATS discussion on it somewhere.

She said that it was brilliant white, no orange or yellow in the main body or tail. Toward the end of the event it may have broken up into a few large pieces. I am so bummed that I missed it AND had the camera sitting here on the table. Booo!

Originally posted by Spectre
She said that it was brilliant white, no orange or yellow in the main body or tail. Toward the end of the event it may have broken up into a few large pieces.

Bolid.
Or maybe meteorite. (if something came to surface)
You better check newspapers have anyone heard sonic boom, these can cause loud thunder-like noise.
Also local amateur astronomer club might now more.

Satellites and that "trash made by human" generally burn colorfully in atmosphere.
And controlled re-entry of any bigger satellite is made to pacific ocean.

Hey,
I live in Sydney Australia and at the begining of the year i had a similar experience. Me and my friend were at the lookout near my house and we saw a fireball heading to ground near an abandoned military base, it was bright and white, we were there a good 5 mins before it happened and we are sure it wasnt a flare because of its size, fall, color and shape. I was honestly expecting to see a mushroom cloud when it hit, strangley enought there were no planes flying over the area, nothing shot into the air, and made an extremly loud whistling noise (like when the wind blows into a closed window but some air still comes through). No one wrote into the paper to report it, it wasnt on the news and no one i know saw it (including regular surfers at the beach i know that were surfing at the time it happened and easily should have seen it).

It left a large smoke trail and fell quite fast (not like a meteor) and seemed to be in a controlled fall

Spec,

Anything in your local papers? I checked Monmouth, Mercer NJ papers but saw nothing.

One weird thing though, last night around 7:45 pm, I saw what I believe were military planes filling up the sky. They appeared to be taking off/ascending from Ft. Dix/McGuire AFB which is West of where I live. It was one after another and they stayed within 100-150 mile radius, My general area seeming to be the center. They were flying in all different directions at different altitudes. At one point there must have been 15-20 of them. They were very quiet and had very bright strobes on both wings. Then only way I could hear a noise if they were flying directly over me, and at a lower altitude. It just "did not compute" the low amount of noise they made.

There was also NO commercial/private aircraft in the sky. I tend to point my head up when Im outside at night and although my area isn't a heavy commercial/private flight area, there are usually a few in the sky. I watched for about two hours straight as the were flying around.

Could be just a weird coincidence, Military exercise who knows. I was wondering if that fireball could have possibly made landfall and they were searching with infrared or some other technology looking for the thing as I assume it would still be very hot.

I'll keep my eyes open tonight also.

Good timing, K. I was just looking this up to post.

I just looked through Philly's The Inquirer and USA Today for good measure - zero results. I have emailed a meteor observation group, no reply yet. I've checked observations on Heavens-Above, nothing there. It's very disappointing.

I was in NJ today myself, but was pretty busy, forgot to check papers there, & could not get time to call around to local astronomy groups. Maybe I can tomorrow before we head out.

Best of luck with your observations! What you and yeoldehomer posted is interesting, too.

E_T is the voice of reason. If it was not space junk it was probably a meteor. There are a couple of minor showers going on now, including The Sextantids, a daytime shower that I have read about but never observed.