LOUD Booms and Shaking Homes. Extremely Bright Fireball In The Sky!

Originally posted by iforget
I guess that depends on how you define fireball

I always use the technical definition:

A fireball is another term for a very bright meteor, generally brighter than magnitude -4, which is about the same magnitude of the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky.

Source: The American Meteor Society Fireball FAQs

Originally posted by iforget
thanks for filling some of the blanks

You're welcome.

Originally posted by iforget
I left good information all around

Yes. I gave you a star even though I thought your post was not "perfect", but I think anyone who encourages others to go out an look deserves a pat on the back

Originally posted by innervision0730
I am surprised NASA didn't see it coming

See my post here for an explanation.

Basically its because relatively small meteoroids/asteroids like the one that caused the booms in this case do not reflect much light, so they are hard to spot even if they are quite close, and impossible to spot when they are a long way off.

At this kind of size they do not pose much threat (if any) anyway, so it is better to direct resources to size range of objects that do pose a threat to us.

Originally posted by innervision0730
I'm not sure if it hit anywhere yet but they are still investigating it, it will probably take a few days to week to find it. Heck, it could be in the middle of an open field. Whoever finds it will be so lucky!

In the vast majority of cases objects like this one don't hit the ground with significant force, if that's what you were implying. Our atmosphere is very good at slowing them down, and in fact, most objects like this break up 10's of km above the ground. Any pieces that survive the breakup are rapidly slowed down, and fall to the ground harmlessly after having spent a few minutes falling through the air. See this link for lots more info on the subject.

In this case it was reported that doppler radar detected debris from the break up falling, so there is a very good chance that something will be found soon. I'm sure meteorite hunters are already homing in on the area.

If it had been orange, I could tell you exactly what that was ,,,,

THE GREAT PUMPKIN !!!

Originally posted by innervision0730
reply to post by Tazkven

 

That's why people should live their lives to the fullest.

Well said and I couldn't agree more

Ok this is ATS so i'm gonna go there... here's the thing.. the RAINBOW incident.. seems very odd esp since it occured just before the "meteorite" in question. Yet no one's around here seems to think it's odd and out of place? could the meteorite be the cover story for this one? After all you can only have so many exploding bunkers and space junk stories to go around.
I know nothing about beams and particle rays but COME ON! this one screams WEIRDNESS!! 4 in one month.. ( all with sonic booms and cover stories) and this is NORMAL skies? nnnnoooo i don't normally hear fireballs from the sky stories nor have i seen that many in one month... Come on Ats you have theories let's hear em!

reply to post by gnosticagnostic


Yes, very odd for sure considering the frequency of the meteorites lately. I just can't seem to find the correlation between the two. The rain droplets act like a prism and separate otherwise incoherent light (which appears white to us) into the separate colors of the spectrum, so I would say there does have to be rain, or at least droplets of moisture somewhere in the air. With hurricane Sandy making her big entrance, perhaps that had something to do with it? Has there been rainbows with other meteor sightings?

reply to post by innervision0730
i don't believe so but then i think they other 3 were all at night... i could be wrong though

Originally posted by gnosticagnostic
Ok this is ATS so i'm gonna go there... here's the thing.. the RAINBOW incident.. seems very odd esp since it occured just before the "meteorite" in question. Yet no one's around here seems to think it's odd and out of place? could the meteorite be the cover story for this one? After all you can only have so many exploding bunkers and space junk stories to go around.
I know nothing about beams and particle rays but COME ON! this one screams WEIRDNESS!!

Firstly, rainbows are relatively common. Since when is a rainbow an "incident"?

Secondly, why should there be any connection to begin with?

A fireball like this one would be seen over a wide area - many thousands of square miles. Prior to the meteor occurring many other things would have been occurring in that same area - perhaps a flock of birds few by someone, or a worker in warehouse using a fork-lift carrying some pallets has them fall off his fork-lift.

Why shouldn't one of those "incidents" be connected with the fireball instead of the rainbow?

How would a relatively small meteoroid that is thousands of km away and approaching Earth affect or cause a rainbow?

There is no known physical mechanism that would accomplish this - unless an event that occurs in the future can affect something that has already occurred in the past.

Even if the meteor/fireball had occurred BEFORE the rainbow, there is no known mechanism for a fireball to be able interact with lower atmosphere weather. Even big fireballs are 10's of km above the ground at their lowest point, and yes they may drop meteorites which would fall through weather near to the ground, but a few bucket fulls of stones falling through clouds/rain isn't likely to have any affect whatsoever.

By the way, it may not even have been a rainbow, but even if it was sun dogs, those are common too, as I explained a little later on in that thread.

To sum up, there is no way that these two events are related - why should they be? Coincidences happen all the time, but this is hardly a rare one.

Sure, fireballs like this one don't occur over the same area every day, but there are probably at least two every day on this scale that occur somewhere in the world. Occasionally the US (like anywhere else in the world) gets a little more than it's quota, but it evens out over time.

Originally posted by gnosticagnostic
i don't normally hear fireballs from the sky stories nor have i seen that many in one month.

So because you didn't hear about them, does that mean they did not occur?

What if I told you that I have been following fireball reports, and studying the subject for nearly 15 years, and this happens every year?

I had a long argument with someone on exactly the same topic nearly 2 years ago. That person (who is now banned) claimed to be a genius and a teacher, but he did not even know the difference between raw data and data that has been statistically analyzed. The thread was basically pointless, apart from it serves to show that when people first find out that lots of relatively small rocks hit us every day, they assume that this must be something new... but it's not.

The other assumption he (and others) made/make is that because this is new, and seems to be getting more frequent, it must be building up to something, but again, that is not necessarily the case.

Even if it was the case, an increase in the rate of small objects (which pose no threat to us) are hitting us, has no bearing on the frequency of larger objects that hit us.

For example:

In November1998 I had the very rare privilege of witnessing a fireball storm. It came, and went, and we are still here.

In 2001 I again had the privilege to observe another meteor storm that reached well over 2000 meteors per hour at peak, although the "corrected hourly rate" (ZHR) was around 4500 meteors per hour at peak in some locations.

In 1966 there was a great storm of meteors, and for about 10-15 minutes, meteors were falling at a rate of 40-50 per second.

None of these extreme events were a prelude to anything.

Although all the above examples are comet related (meteors are the debris of comets), the principals are no different with asteroids.

In fact we are just finding out what, and how much is hitting us, and we are getting better at doing that, which is just one of the reasons why we hear about more events than we would have in the past.

reply to post by FireballStorm


you are a total debbie downer... lmao.. the rainbow is weird because it was straight verticle.. as in NO ARC and no RAIN.. could it have been a sun dog? ummm a very possible long shot as who mixes up a rainbow with a sun dog? but anywho.. if you don't wanna see anything strange in it then all the more power to you.. I think it's odd.

We had this in Arizona city Az over a week ago, a small town of 10,000, so it was not in the news or anything but our FB boards for this town were afire with everyone wanting to know what that sound was and what was shaking our homes. I wonder if it was a meteor too.

My internet went out afterwards, and so did others, then it kept crashing and so did others here. Really strange.

Originally posted by bmck12
ok it was not part of the teuroid meteor shower... according to NASA in Huntsville this was a meteorite that broke our atmosphere and produced a very loud sonic boom... they are estimating that it was the size of a nice boulder and streaked around 30 miles above the earth... thus the large number of sightings... They said they are having problems finding where is actually hit the earth.... I still say my backyard... I am so stoked about this... Nothing ever happens here in the woods.....
Yes the rainbow was something: there was no arc whatsoever it was just straight up and down.... I just kept looking at it since it was right in front of me on my drive home...

edit on 30-10-2012 by bmck12 because: add information

If thats a fact then GO FIND IT, those damn things are worth a fortune sometimes.......seriously GO look for it

Originally posted by gnosticagnostic
the rainbow is weird because it was straight verticle.. as in NO ARC and no RAIN.

Here are a couple of examples of "straight" rainbows:


Source: Truly Amazing Pictures Of The Rainbow

I took this on myself last year:

12 I saw a rainbow that was straight (not round)??

You probably saw a small section of the rainbow, maybe with the sun low in the sky. If the rain-producing storm was in the distance, you'd have seen a short vertical pillar, which is just the base of the rainbow where it intersects Earth.

Source: Frequently asked questions about the rainbow

Granted, you said "no rain", but at a distance it's not always possible to see the rain clearly.

Originally posted by gnosticagnostic
could it have been a sun dog?

Since no rain was reported, that suggests that it MIGHT have been a sun dog/sun dogs, or even a rarer halo/arc.

Thanks to Sandy relatively rare halo/arc displays have been seen in areas near the outer edges of the storm, so it's quite possible that it was something like that.

At the end of the day, I was not there. I can only go on reports, and not everyone reports as accurately as we might like...

Originally posted by gnosticagnostic
ummm a very possible long shot as who mixes up a rainbow with a sun dog?

As I tried to point out in my previous post, one ATS member said they thought it was a rainbow (here), then later withdrew their statement and said that it was a sun dog/sundogs.

I don't have the time, but if you dig, you'll find many examples of people who don't know the difference between a rainbow and a halo/arc.

In my experience, most people don't even know what a sun dog is. When my partner and I go to our local "observing spot" which is on a hill and has great views, we often spot sun dogs and other halos. It's only when we get excited, and start pointing up at them that people gather round and ask us what we are photographing/looking/pointing at. They invariably thank us for pointing out something they never knew existed when they leave.

Here's the most recent sun dog I photographed - about 1 month back (haven't had much spare time recently):

Wide angle view:


Telephoto:

Originally posted by gnosticagnostic
if you don't wanna see anything strange in it then all the more power to you.. I think it's odd.

I'm only going on my own experience of the subject. What is "odd" to one person, will not be "odd" to another, since we all have different levels of experience.