Jump to content

Narrowband

Leo S

Members
  • Posts

    350
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Leo S

  1. In general point meteors are rare, usually best seen during times of very high meteor activity. In most cases, meteors would be one in 1 second or less. To see a negative magnitude, very long lasting point meteor would be an exceptionally rare thing. More likely would be a flare from a satellite I think. Ther are often slow moving enough that if you only see a few seconds worth they might appear not to move, especially if they were a bit away from reference points/stars. XW-2F looks like a good candidate:
  2. Space junk will usually last many 10's of seconds, but to me the footage I've seen here (see below) looks more like a natural fireball - rate of travel and the terminal flash look like multiple events my own cameras have caught.
  3. Yes, but unfortunately in this case it was over the sea.
  4. I often see these posted. Slow moving, around sunset/sunrise, and with a double tail is usually a sure sign of an aircraft/contrail.
  5. Electrical fault/transformer failure would be my guess too. Sometimes a bright meteor can light up the sky, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that here.
  6. I think you are right to discard meteors as a potential cause. While it's not uncommon for meteors of fireball magnitude/brightness to produce very bright green flashes that can briefly illuminate the entire sky, a frequency of minutes suggests something else. I ran multiple cameras night after night for a couple of years and they caught a few (example #1, #2), but only on major shower peak nights is it usual to catch more than one or two in a night. It is also possible for there to be multiple fireballs over the course of minutes (it happened in November 1998, which is what got me interested in the subject in the first place) but can also happen during the peaks of stronger annual showers like the Geminids, but I think if that were the case, you'd probably also see the fireballs themselves, assuming you had reasonable views of the skies. I think the chances are that others would have observed, and reported the fireballs too is that were the cause, since fireballs can be observed from many hundreds of miles away - a display like your description suggests would likely not go unnoticed. Given the above, my guess is that the flashes are much more localized and probably human related (military/pyrotechnics perhaps as you suggested), but perhaps there is still a chance it might be some unusual natural phenomenon. "Earth Lights" perhaps? Have you checked seismological data for the area? Lightning related phenomena can also be observed from hundreds of miles away potentially, and since we are at solar max perhaps that's worth checking too even though auroras may be unlikely at your latitude. I'm guessing you have some very dark skies there where you are, and if that is the case you might be observing subtle flashes that might be missed elsewhere, although I'd have a hard time believing it's something unusual that everyone else is missing... but you never know. At the end of the day, there could be multiple possibilities that we are not thinking of - reminds me of this story from last year. Please consider setting up a camera or two. They are game changers. They don't have to be expensive, as this thread shows, and they can often help in solving puzzles like this one.
  7. Another sizable fireball over Europe a few nights back - there have been others in the mean time, but this one was imaged. Here's one image, credit cyrille a:
  8. Ironically I only found out about Spaceguard after we'd moved, but before that we lived almost just down the road from it for 8 years.
  9. Thanks for the offer, but not to worry - tried the clip in another browser and it worked much better. I agree, it does look like a meteor. Good catch 👍
  10. Any chance you could upload the clip elsewhere (vimeo, youtube, for example)? Some use timers along the lines of these to turn off the camera.
  11. Thanks for the live feed. Bookmarked If you want actual software designed for meteors, have a look here, and here. It includes software that analyzes meteors and can work out orbits if footage from another camera is available. Edit to add: No matter. I see you got your software to work. I'm having trouble viewing the footage, but while it was downloading I could see little bits - it looks like you caught an aircraft, but I could be wrong.
  12. Well the length of the pitch only gives you an idea of the asteroid's diameter or longest dimension, but of course asteroids are not 2 dimensional. In this case the asteroid which is estimated at 285m (is a pitch really that large?) is going to be significantly bigger than a giraffe - it's s bit smaller than the size of asteroid Apophis whose size you can get an idea of in the video here. In the image below, it would fall somewhere between the Eiffel Tower and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Asteroids of this size would certainly have global ramifications if they impacted!
  13. NASA just issued a warning over a close approach of a "football pitch" sized object that is due to buzz us this Friday at a distance of "just" 7.5 LD. No danger of impact, but it is on the large side, hence the warning. There is actually an increase in fireball rates in the N hemisphere every year around this time of year, so it's no surprise that there is plenty of news about at the moment, but the main point I want to emphasize here is that, right now we are only detecting a tiny proportion of the smaller ~1m sized objects - of which there are many. I would guestimate that these impact every few days, but of course most would occur over sea or uninhabited/sparely inhabited areas and might not get reported. I always like to check spaceweather.com for the recent/upcoming near Earth asteroid approaches (scroll down a bit to the table), as well as to see what else is going on in the sky. It's interesting to see how the chart changes, and if you look at the asteroid names, which include the year of discovery you can get a sense of just how many new discoveries are being made on an almost daily basis. Right now the chart is surprisingly "quiet", but that is sure to change! As an aside, I was able to run my cameras all evening yesterday, and managed to catch a smaller event that was reported as a fireball, although I'm not sure it was quite bright enough to qualify as a fireball, but it might have been. This was one of 3 reported events last night reported by people in the UK.
  14. Not sure if you were aware, but this was actually the 8th predicted asteroid impact. Each event so far has been amazing to follow, and the frequency is bound to increase as we discover more of the smaller incoming ones before they are due to hit, so should be plenty of opportunity to image these events in the future. I already have a "grab and go" kit bag ready if another close by impact is forecast! Of course the 7th (you can find more on this if you look back through old IMO news), which would have been visible from here except for the cloud will probably mean that we missed our chance for a while, but there are still plenty of large fireballs that get through with out being predicted. One of my cameras caught this near -8mag fragmenting fireball a couple of weeks back for example.
  15. They are actually quite common, at least during the day. But much of the time they are faint and/or incomplete, so not always easy to see unless you look for them. Often in the day the 22 degree is accompanied by sun dogs (or moondogs at night, if the Moon is bright enough) and/or a CZA, so it's worth keeping an eye out for those too, as well as the other halos when you see a 22 degree.
  16. It was estimated to be around 1m. Certainly at that size many observatories will be at their limits, and it would have to be close. In this case there were only a couple of hours notice, and I think we are unlikely to get much more notice with objects this size, until the tech improves - but it's improving rapidly. Still very impressive to be able to spot something this small with a few hours to spare.
  17. My cameras (3x a7SII) pick them up from time to time. Here are a couple of them (from different dates) which I've combined into a single image. These are very heavily enlarged/zoomed in.
  18. Lovely sky Andrew. I managed to see the PSCs on Thursday, but while we were out shopping, and no proper camera with me. Also spotted some suspected PSCs earlier on today, but they were in the east, so very little colour.
  19. They are not really traveling up of course. These are what we call "earthgrazers" since they enter the atmosphere at very low angles, and only skim the outer edge of the atmosphere, but can have the appearance of an object shooting up from the ground. You can only observe earthgrazing meteors when the radiant is close to or below the horizon, and they are quite rare to observe. Usually they are only observed during times of high activity (we observed dozens in the buildup of the Leonid meteor storm of 2001 - for me this was the best part of the night, even better than experiencing visual rates of ~2500 meteors per hour later on in the night). They can be very impressive and long lasting, sometimes covering 1/2 the sky since they don't disintegrate as quickly as meteors entering at higher angles. "Thicker" implies a larger particle/meteoroid, and therefore brighter. Many space rocks are made of relatively weak material, so when they experience the extreme forces associated with slamming into thicker parts of our atmosphere, they often catastrophically break up creating a bright terminal flash. Here's an alpha Capricornid my camera caught that exploded. Indeed, if you observe a meteor low down in the sky, it can only be a fireball since you are observing it through thick atmosphere which has the effect of significantly dimming objects due to "atmospheric extinction". You can see meteors high in the sky easily because you are looking through significantly less atmosphere, and they are also much closer to you. A fireball observed low in the sky will often confuse people because they are so bright, which we would normally interpret as being close (that is normally the case with most lights we encounter, so our subconscious, decides that they must be close, creating an optical illusion), but fireballs can often be surprisingly bright, while at the same time being far off, despite atmospheric extinction. It's not uncommon to see someone reporting that it "fell in the next field" or "just over the hill" if a bright fireball is observed by many, and there is a good example form just a dew days back, when a DAYLIGHT fireball was observed by many in the north. You can see where the event actually occurred (far out at sea), but at least two witnesses reported it apparently near to them, which of course could not be the case! It's obvious when you compare the locations of the two witnesses who made the above comments that they can#t both be right since they are many tens of km away from each other.
  20. Their model is once again showing a possible major hit this evening. Three CMEs could combine just in the right place for us to get a strong storm. Unfortunately it doesn't look great in terms of cloud here, but perhaps someone will have clear skies!
  21. Are the previous 4 replies referring to last night?
  22. Can't believe the TV news is saying tonight is the night to observe. It's raining here right now! I gave up around 01:20 last night when it got too cloudy. The cameras should have caught a few, but I also had the impression this year was lacking in fireballs (I'll have to reserve final judgement till after I've checked the footage) - perhaps other areas got them this year?! Was hoping to set up the cameras again tonight, but I'll probably start checking through the footage from last night (around 8 hrs in tot) instead!
  23. Had my 3 cameras running since around 17:40 UT (still running now @ 00:05 UT although it's starting to cloud up a little) and have observed visually for short periods, sporadically, when I've had the chance. There was a nice cluster of 5 Geminids in around the same number of seconds @ ~18:25 UT, two of which were negative magnitude. Also saw a couple of bright meteors on the camera screens, so should have something at least.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.