31–40 of 85 posts
That's a meteor. Meteorites are different - they're the ones that hit the dirt.
This post is mistitled. The original Tweet is:
A 1-meter meteoroid (small #asteroid) has been detected and is expected to safely strike Earth's atmosphere over northern France between 3:50-4:03 CET.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This site truly is where humor goes to die.
I didn't think I was keeping that straight a face. But on the other hand, now I get to check "twit Cegłowski" off my bucket list, and that's worth a joke falling a little bit flat.
So cool to see how far our detection of these objects is coming along, especially for something as small as this was.
Wow!! From just east of Aachen, perfectly visible. Turning from a point of light coming down into a "oh wow that's really cool" into an actual fireball at >400 km horizontal distance! Holy crap that was exhilarating Edit: I was expecting that it would be too far away, also with Aachen's city glow and the highway, that nothing would be visible, or at best, a point appearing and disappearing at basically the same locat…
How did you check your phone's time synchronization?
Wow!! From just east of Aachen, perfectly visible. Turning from a point of light coming down into a "oh wow that's really cool" into an actual fireball at >400 km horizontal distance! Holy crap that was exhilarating Edit: I was expecting that it would be too far away, also with Aachen's city glow and the highway, that nothing would be visible, or at best, a point appearing and disappearing at basically the same locat…
Great writeup, thanks! How did you check your phone's time synchronization?
Per this thread https://twitter.com/tw__astro/status/1624908400902504451 it seems my time is a bit off, though. I took the filename and just checked the time offset in the video. Was considering checking metadata but thought 'nah, those few milliseconds difference'. However, exiftool says 2023:02:13 02:59:29, file name is 20230213_035256.mp4. Adding those three seconds to my previous guess comes out to the tweet's time.
As I write this, I'm still... what's the word, excited? Thrilled? Like, I'm still not down to baseline relaxed. It's really just five seconds of light show, but looking at an astronomical event unfolding, knowing this is hundreds of kilometers away in northwestern France, the tiny voice in the back of your head as you see it explode "could they have been wrong about it being just 1 meter?" I wasn't truly scared at any point but the combination of feelings and awe is still a little bit with me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The continuous-rod warhead in a Sidewinder will rip the hell out of an aircraft, which is made of tinfoil wrapped around complications. A rock from space, by contrast, is made out of rock wrapped around rock. Assuming charitably that the missile could generate an intercept, you would probably get some sparks, maybe more or less depending on how much of the rock is actually nickel and iron. But basically, the rock is…
This site truly is where humor goes to die.
why are these events always forecasted so late? some hours earlier i could have witnessed it
In general, it also is extra difficult to calculate the exact last little bit of a trajectory that will impact earth because the force models start getting really wild as something gets very close to earth - approximations stop working.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't think I was keeping that straight a face. But on the other hand, now I get to check "twit Cegłowski" off my bucket list, and that's worth a joke falling a little bit flat.
"Tinfoil wrapped around complications" is definitely going in my quotes file. Reads like James Mickens! (If that's what you were going for, well done. If not, go read his stuff immediately.)