Thanks for your input on this. I'll share some more thoughts-
I read those comments, too (about it being 20 or 300 yards away). Here's
what I'm thinking - there's a pretty common misunderstanding between
distance and angular distance. We've all heard meteorite stories where
someone claims "it was right in front of me", only to find out later that
the object was hundreds of miles away. It's just not possible to judge the
distance of an object in the sky when you have no idea of its size.
The person who said it was 20 yards away also described it as a "fireball"
with "ripples from the heat"... which makes me think it was quite higher up
than 20 yards.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong... that would mean there are
meteorites!
Whether or not anything reached the ground from this one, it made me realize
how useful Twitter is for gathering eyewitness accounts. A few of these
people probably pulled out their cell phones and posted to Twitter within
minutes of the event. Best of all, these 25 people could easily be
contacted via Twitter if someone wants to seriously investigate this (get
latitudes/longitudes, etc.).
For this event, I found 25 witnesses on Twitter. Next time, it could be 50
or 100... who knows? This could prove to be a very useful tool for
meteorite hunters. I wanted to nickname this "the Twitter meteorite" if
anything gets found, but then I saw someone mention "Twitterite", which is
even better. The term has been coined - now we just need to find one.
--Noah
----- Original Message -----
From: <geo...@aol.com>
To: <meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2009 10:07 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] August 24th fireball over Canada
I've been following eyewitness reports of a fireball that was seen at
around
9:00pm on August 24th over Canada. I made a blog post about it the next
morning, where I compiled 25 eyewitness reports from Twitter users:<<
I read these reports and this is what I've initially come up with...
I get the impression that there is a chance for a meteorite to have been
dropped by this fireball. This is solely based on one person saying they
heard a "bang" (sonic boom I presume). Another person said that it lasted
for
about 2 seconds...so this eliminates a satellite. Another person said
that
it traveled very fast across the sky. Also eliminating a satellite.
Traveling very fast across the sky causes me to interpret this as a
fireball of
cometary origin...not likely to drop meteorites if this is the case. One
person said it was only 20 yards away from them and another said it was
about
300 yards away. The question that comes to my mind for them is "Why
didn't
you pick up the meteorite?" only being 20 yards away. I assume they are
referring to being able to see it only because it was incandescent. I
assume
this to be the case...then the question comes to mind as to how big it
must
have been to be incandescent while it's only about 20 yards above the
earth.
Roughly 10 tons in weight traveling at least 2 or 3 miles per second. Now
I'm thinking, "How did they survive?" :O)
George Zay
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