Hi All, I've been revisiting the June 7th, 1998, fall over Stanfield, AZ (Indian Butte), attempting to better constrain the original bolide flight direction. I know David Kring at the time collected hundreds of reports from witnesses, trying to piece together the trajectory and a likely fall zone. David correctly surmised that the fall ended somewhere between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, but nowhere have I read a report that estimated the flight direction and entry angle. The only mention I've seen was in a reposted article that appeared on the meteorobs list:
http://www.meteorobs.org/maillist/msg08069.html The paragraph in particular is a witness report by Joe Montani from central Tucson: "Joe Montani, an observer with the UA Spacewatch program, which scans the heavens looking for comets and asteroids, saw this object from his back yard in central Tucson. "He said it appeared in the sky almost due north, and while it appeared to go almost straight down toward the ground, that likely was an optical illusion. Montani believes it may have been moving almost parallel to the Earth's surface. "If its angle of attack had been any more shallow, it would have bounced off the Earth's atmosphere and back into space," Montani said. Joe's conclusions are completely at odds with one another, so either he was misquoted or he was completely mistaken about either the bearing or direction of motion. As we now know, he could not possibly have seen the meteor in his north heading vertically downward. That would have put the terminus to his north, which it certainly wasn't. He ~might~ have first seen it in his north moving right-to-left nearly *parallel* to the ground, but that is 90 degrees different from going "almost straight down toward the ground". As an observer with Spacewatch, Joe would know this, so I'm leaning toward a misquote by the reporter. The evidence in the radar data says the bolide travelled northeast to southwest with a shallow entry angle. Was curious if this is consistent with all the reports that Kring collected. --Rob ______________________________________________ Visit our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/meteoritecentral and the Archives at http://www.meteorite-list-archives.com Meteorite-list mailing list [email protected] https://pairlist3.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
