What is it?
Probably a weather balloon
Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
41–50 of 158 posts
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn YouTube is pushing the ads these days. I don't remember last time I opened YouTube and didn't see an ad on open. I'm logged into Chrome, no VPN or funny business. What a racket.
Try uBlock oirign my friend.
I know the idea of paying for things isn't cool or whatever, but there's also the option of paying for premium, which also gets rid of ads on mobile without using having to sideload some sketchy app.
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#43Are we having lately many more meteor sightings than "before", or is it just that we have better tools/more cameras to spot it?
Around 2003, I was driving home from San Francisco back to Danville late at night. After the 580 tunnel, as I crested the hill, the entire sky lit up bright green and I saw a huge glowing ball like this that lasted for a few seconds. These days, I'd have dashcam footage to show you. I was driving alone and the roads were pretty much empty, and it's kind of weird when something so unusual happens and you feel like the…
The first time I saw Starlink I had a long think before asking anyone about it as describing a line of lights in the sky made me sound like a madman.
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#44The most common metallic meteors are iron-nickel, so green is a common color. This glow tends to be brightest when meteors hit the atmosphere at high speed.
Do meteors ever hit the atmosphere at low speed?
Velocity is relative to a frame of reference. My understanding is that if an object has a low velocity compared to Earth it will more likely drift away due to earth-moon gravity interactions. An example is Apollo 10 third stage and lunar module ascent stage which are in solar orbits to this day.
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#45The most common metallic meteors are iron-nickel, so green is a common color. This glow tends to be brightest when meteors hit the atmosphere at high speed.
Do meteors ever hit the atmosphere at low speed?
While the odds of what I'm about to describe are astronomically (pun intended) low, I can see the following occurring:
- earth moves in its orbit
- meteor is moving in a straight line
- that line is perfectly parallel to a point on the earth's orbit
- the earth and the meteor basically link up and the speeds match so precisely that the meteor just goes into orbit
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had an experience a bit like that, but with mini-tornadoes, somewhere along the M11 in the UK (Essex I think, but perhaps the edge of Cambs). I recall looking it up afterwards and it seemed to be 'a thing', though none of the news examples I found from various years before the event were anything like as extreme - tens and tens of them, well-formed. A truly bizarre 'what is happening' experience for me - before tha…
" the UK gets an average of 30-50 tornadoes a year. That’s more tornadoes per land area than anywhere else in the world (except – weirdly – the Netherlands.) " https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3QTh1mRGDNg16cDYHg... I too would've said we never get them here, apart from remembering one big one in the news I think in or near Birmingham...
While some do damage, I have to wonder if most of these events would be called merely whirlwinds or dust devils in most of the world? I'm also guessing that in an area of often high humidity, a funnel cloud might more easily form in a relatively weak whirlwind, that if it happened elsewhere.
Also, this is south-east England ("Berkshire into London") specifically, and also the Netherlands - some of the more densely populated parts of the globe, so I see a possible correlation to the density of observers here...
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#47I think I saw one of these during a meteor shower, ten years ago, in Georgia. It was so fast, and so unexpected, that I question my own recollection of it. When I tell people I saw a fireball, they shrug. They don't know how it's different from a shooting star. But in my memory it looks like a smoky fireball, and I had the impression that it was particularly close to the earth.
I also saw one of these ~10 years ago at the end of December. I was in South Florida, and it was up in the sky long enough for me to tell everyone to look up, so five or six other people saw it too.
It seemed much bigger/longer than the one listed here, wonder if I'll be able to find it in the fireball database.
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try uBlock oirign my friend.
I know the idea of paying for things isn't cool or whatever, but there's also the option of paying for premium, which also gets rid of ads on mobile without using having to sideload some sketchy app.
Google don't deserve your money
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#49This is your annual reminder to have a real DR plan in case us-east-1 goes away. Partly kidding, but also, y'know, when I see "fireball over northeast US" my mind jumps there.
if us-east-1 "goes away" most of us have bigger problems than data recovery
Re: Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA
#50What is it?
Intercontinental missile being burned up in the atmosphere.