Archaeologica.org

Another one for E.P.



Picture of the Day – Fireball Meteor Over Groningen
17 October 2009

The brilliant fireball meteor captured in this snapshot was a startling visitor to Tuesday evening’s twilight skies over the city of Groningen.

In fact, sightings of the meteor, as bright as the Full Moon, were widely reported throughout the Netherlands and Germany at approximately 17:00 UT. Accompanied by sonic booms and rumbling sounds, the meteor was seen to break up into bright fragments, eventually leaving a persistent smoke-like trail. Even though there are bright fireball meteors in planet Earth’s atmosphere every day, sightings of them are relatively rare because they more often occur over oceans and uninhabited areas.

Well last night was the peak of the Orionids.

Yeah but I'll be damned if I'm getting up at 4:30 in the morning to look at them.

Why don't these things take place during regular business hours!

Minimalist wrote:Why don't these things take place during regular business hours!

They do! All the time! Exactly 50% of them. Thousands! Every day!
Only you don't see them because it's daylight and you actively avoid looking at the bright sky. To make sure you even don sunglasses and a hat or cap. So they do "take place during regular business hours", but 1) you're not looking, and 2) if you were looking: they're of course much less visible than during the night...

dannan14 wrote:Well last night was the peak of the Orionids.

Agreed: this was probably one of those Orionids. 99,9% Are sand grain sized. Possibly millions. Thousands are pebble sized. Those are the shooting stars we see at night. A few among them are bigger. This was one. Even the K-T impactor (whichever of the proposed candidates) probably was one, a big one, in a swarm of millions of small, tiny, and microscopic ones.

they're of course much less visible than during the night...

Well, screw 'em, then!