Huge Green Fireball & April-May Arc of Earth's Orbit

Taken by Monika Landy-Gyebnar on April 8, 2018 @ Veszprem, Hungary

Photographer Monika Landy-Gyebnar reports: "I was out photographing the sunset, then waited until the International Space Station (ISS) and somewhat later the Progress MS-07 flew overhead. The fireball fell during the time between the two spacecraft. The flower in the foreground is a local pasque flower (Pulsatilla nigricans) which I wanted to include in my picture of the ISS."

Landy-Gyebnar says the magnitude of the fireball was about -10--in other words, more than 100 times brighter than the planet Venus.

Now for the mystery: Sporadic fireballs appear 10% to 30% more often during northern spring compared to other times of year--and no one knows why. "We've been aware of this phenomenon for more than 30 years," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "It's not only fireballs that are affected. Meteorite falls--space rocks that actually hit the ground--are more common in spring as well." Perhaps there is a diffuse swarm of meteoroids scattered in the April-May arc of Earth's orbit, giving rise to the extra fireballs. If so, its origin is unknown.

www.spaceweather.com...

Wait a second. Falling between two spacecrafts '"coincidentally" and it's origin remains unknown... signs in the sky anyone?

ATSliens, have at it!

a reply to: PublicOpinion

Just to report

Melbourne, Australia.

very late 9th April or very early 10th April

Nice green streak, much faster than most meteorites I usually spot and left a streak like the image.

Direction: Spotted directly above heading North West.

i think i know,

a reply to: odzeandennz

That escalated quickly!
And while we're at it: the "Angelic UFO" striked again on the 6th of April ( about 18:00 pm):

sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov...

Or didn't it?

originally posted by: PublicOpinion
Wait a second. Falling between two spacecrafts '"coincidentally" and it's origin remains unknown... signs in the sky anyone?

ATSliens, have at it!

Clutching at straws anyone

a reply to: wmd_2008

All work and no play makes wmd a dull strawman.

a reply to: PublicOpinion

A bit of context from the OP's source:

The inner solar system is littered with dusty, gravelly debris from decaying comets and shattered asteroids. Every night Earth scoops up tons--literally tons--of this material, resulting in a slow drizzle of bright fireballs. Astronomers call them "sporadics." If you stay outside all night long, you might see as many as a dozen if the weather is clear.

Source: spaceweather.com/

To put things more into context, a few grams of material, traveling at the speeds meteors do, is enough to produce a fireball class event. However, the event imaged by Monika Landy-Gyebnar is obviously significantly brighter than a borderline fireball, which means the initial mass of the meteoroid would have been much greater than "a few grams". A few 10's of lbs would be consistent with a slow -10 magnitude fireball, although magnitude is often overestimated by the inexperienced, and I would tentatively guess it was more like -8 or -9 mag., which would be consistent with a few lbs.

With multiple tonnes of material entering our atmosphere each 24 hrs, although most is in the form of micro-meteoroids (not even visible to the naked eye) and dimmer meteors, there is bound to be a fair few large masses mixed in there. To put it another way, most people severely underestimate the number of fireballs we get.

With this in mind, it's not that unusual that someone would catch a shot like this. With a constant "drizzle" of fireballs, almost any "coincidence" will happen if you give it enough time. Year on year I see more people trying out their DSLRs on the stars, which is also going to increase the chances of images like this being captured over time.

Further, if you count all satellites as "spacecraft", with well over 1000 operational (and more that are non-operational), then likely every fireball in the last 2 decades has fallen between 2 (or more) spacecraft.

a reply to: PublicOpinion

Wait a second. Falling between two spacecrafts '"coincidentally" and it's origin remains unknown... signs in the sky anyone?

I understand it fell during a commercial break during a Wheel of Fortune broadcast.

What are the chances of that?

Just doing a bit more digging on this event, and it appears that it's the same event which was widely observed across central Europe. The IMO has 50 reports for this event at the time of writing and it was captured on at least 5 cameras including Karoly Jonas's fireball camera (combined frame image is all I could find, but there should be footage somewhere).

The estimated magnitude from the footage (a much more accurate estimate than witness reports) was -6 magnitude, which is significantly less bright than -10 magnitude, and puts it in the 10's of grams/few ounces initial mass range.

So not really a significant fireball at all. Quite a small one actually (a meteor needs to be -4 or above to be classed as a fireball), although the image looks impressive. Small fireballs like this are relatively common. Impressive images like this one will only become more common place as camera and lens tech improves, so I'd also expect more threads along the same lines of this one. I'll be waiting for the "increase in fireball frequency" type threads to start up again..

a reply to: Zarniwoop



Wow! You have breaks from the commercials with Wheel of Fortune commercials?



a reply to: FireballStorm

Thanks!