Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA | Hacker News Reader

Fireball Spotted over Northeastern USA

ams.imo.net

249 pointsnateb2022150 comments

Looks like the site received the HN hug of death :( For reference, here is a recent web archive capture: https://archive.is/acPT5

In case the link won't load for anyone else, there's a YouTube video on the page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfNdaYqVxR0

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.

Google don't deserve your money

Ublock isn't sketchy. Nor is NewPipe, which allows you to use it (and have favorites) without an account so there's less tracking. Premium doesn't let you do that, you pay but Google still gets to datamine you as much as they want as well.

One of many possible solutions. This one no Javascript, no browser extensions, no Python, no libcurl, no "subscriptions", no BS.

      #!/bin/sh
      x(){ bssl client -connect www.youtube.com:443;};
      x(){ openssl s_client -connect www.youtube.com:443 -ign_eof;}; 
      read x;
      printf "%s\r\n%s\r\n%s\r\n%s\r\n%s\r\n%s\r\n%s\n" \
      "POST /youtubei/v1/player?key=AIzaSyA8eiZmM1FaDVjRy-df2KTyQ_vz_yYM39w HTTP/1.1" \
      "Host: www.youtube.com" \
      "Content-Type: x-www-form-urlencoded" \
      "Content-Length: 121" \
      "Connection: close" \
      "" \
      '{"videoId":"'$x'","context":{"client":{"clientName":"ANDROID","clientVersion":"17.10.35","androidSdkVersion":30}}}' \
      |x|sed -n "/itag=22&/{s/.*: ./<a href=/;s/\",/>$x<\/a>/p;}"

Usage:

      echo RfNdaYqVxR0|1.sh > 1.htm
      chrome ./1.htm

I don't know anything about web tbh - what is that "key=AIzaSy[...]" bit? Is that a user id for duckduckgo private watching type of thing?

No, nothing personally identifiable about the so-called key. Every person who visits www.youtube.com uses the same one; it's public. Anyone can see it in the HTML page source for www.youtube.com. No need to be "logged in" or whatever the latest scheme is to track people for advertising purposes.

That was a pretty wild five seconds. I wish I could have seen it.

Does anyone know the source of the video, or the reason this particular camera is pointed at the sky?

I wish I had the resources to have a HD camera pointed at the sky 24/7 and recording capacity for moments like these.

I mean an HD webcam is not that expensive, and you don't need to record everything, just the interesting actions, any video surveillance software would do....

Typically, video footage is not archived 24/7. Instead, it is common to retain footage for a set number of hours or days before deleting it. If you want to preserve specific segments of the footage, you can "lock" them to prevent deletion.

This process works similarly to a recording buffer, and it is similar to how dash cams operate if you are familiar with those.

Doing this is not actually that complicated -- check out https://globalmeteornetwork.org/ for more information.

I have a camera pointing due south in Massachusetts and I didn't record it -- I think it was too far west from my position.

This was my meteor stack for that night: http://server.istrastream.com/rms/US001N/stack/1678618383.jp... Yes, some of these tracks are planes, and there are a bunch of planes (see http://server.istrastream.com/rms/US001N/captured_stack/1678... for the unfiltered set!)

Total cost is certainly under $150 for the camera, housing etc. The bigger challenge is finding a good place to install the camera that has a good view of the sky.

Why is the top suggestion on a science video like that an anti-vax rant?

Because it causes most engagement? Even you engaged with it in some form. You commented about it here.

Suggestions are personalised for what it thinks you’ll engage with (depending on how much it has profiled you - if you’re logged in, have watch history). The top suggestion for that video when I’m logged in is a video about architecture…

I am not logged it on YouTube (ever). So this is the "default" suggestion.

I don’t think a video of a meteor is a science video. It’s simply a phenomenon.

The scientific method or institutions are helpful for understanding it but it’s not inherently scientific.

Youtube has a general problem that angry and hateful and infuriating content is naturally more engaging to the human brain even if you don't believe it. That's why Youtube will still recommend right wing hate content even if you actively watch straight up socialist propaganda. It's just a more effective strategy that any ML or AI recommendation system will inevitability fall to.

It's similar to how casino slots aren't actually any fun because you don't need any fun to trigger a gambling addict, so they are optimized for that outcome rather than optimized for fun. Except it's even worse because nearly everyone is susceptible to the effects of anger inducing content, it's just how our brain works.

I saw a meteor once when I was a kid. I was on the beach and it streaked across the sky and exploded into a bunch of other things that streaked a little further and faded out.

I never really told anyone because it seem so preposterous that I wasn't really sure I had seen it at all.

It was well out over the over the ocean a number of kilometeres and up very high - zero chance it was fireworks and there weren't ny on that night anyway.

I saw something similar, the weird thing is my brain hallucinated sound that couldn't have possibly been there. It was on dark winter night during a ferry crossing and the chunks intersected the horizon.

A fizzing crackling sound?

Crossed with a low frequency white noise like howl. I see "with sound" on the meteorite spotter page, but it still seems like it was made up.

Interesting, https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1932PA.....40..289W#:~:text=....

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-theory-may-expla....

So maybe not.

I was on a sailing ship in the Atlantic, on the middle of the night watch, when a large meteor streaked across the sky. It burned with several colours (white, green, red, maybe, can’t remember exactly) and made a strong fizzling sound, like something in a hot frying pan with too much oil. I know that couldn’t be from the meteor’s sound waves, so this is the first sensible explanation.

I'd be very surprised if that's the explanation and would rather suspect something like the "noisy GIFs"[1], where a strong visual cue may cause the brain to attach a sound that sounds reasonable.

That's also quite easy to verify - since we have visual sky surveillance, why not add microphones and confirm it really happens, no need to rely on random reports.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/noisygifs

Back in 2004 I saw a meteor and there was a distinct fizzy crackling sound but it was coming off the cars next to me in the car park.

Looks like it is a known thing - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4201328/Stud...

I saw one of these as well, sitting on top of a mountain with a friend. We were there to watch the Perseid meteor shower and were seeing small ones every few minutes, then a much larger one came across the sky. The head of it was glowing orange and green and I could also hear a crackling/burning noise. My friend saw the same thing and we were both so freaked out by it that we headed back to camp shortly afterwards.

Not a hallucination.

Black body radiation coming off that thing that's nearly sun-hot pumps a lot of energy out into the world. Everything that can absorb some of it does so, and twitches.

We tend to think of radio receivers as something special, but they're highly optimized versions of processes going on all the time all around us.

The clearest example I've personally experienced of this was out in the boonies watching a meteor shower with an astronomy club. After a few times hearing my glasses "hiss" just as I was seeing a meteor I asked about it and the fellow in charge (chair of the college astro department) filled us in. It was freakin' awesome.

Do you remember the day, and location? There may be corroborating reports.

It was 40 years ago in Newcastle, Australia at Merewether beach.

I can’t even remember what I did last week.

“The 1978 New South Wales fireball“

4:44am I think - would’ve been visible from Merewether

> Abstract A very large meteor fireball passed through the atmosphere above the east coast of New South Wales early in the morning of 7 April 1978. It was seen at 04.44 AEST (18.44 UT, 6 April) by hundreds of people from the cities of Sydney and Newcastle who deluged the news media with telephoned sightings. The resulting publicity led to the collection of many reports, of which 19 were useful in defining the trajectory and ground track of the fireball. I define here the ground track, which is shown in Fig. 1, and include the locations of the eye-witnesses

https://www.nature.com/articles/285464a0

Nice research!

However 40 years ago was 1983 so unlikely to be same event.

This article

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/127209576?searchT...

mentions:

“On June 19 last, a brilliant fireball was seen over a large part of NSW and the ACT”

…from 1985 referring back to 1984.

But most newspapers from that era not searchable yet. We have to get older first.

Good chance it would’ve been seen by a bunch of people and mentioned in the local newspapers of the time too.

I often look for things at trove — but I think that might be too recent for trove to have the relevant newspaper articles available.

Here’s an example of an advanced search there:

https://trove.nla.gov.au/search/advanced/category/newspapers...

(For meteor and newcastle between 1975 and 1987)

[edit - fixed hyperlink]

For older time periods such as the 1950s - where trove does index the newspapers — it’s very easy to find reports of meteors and bright lights —

https://trove.nla.gov.au/search/advanced/category/newspapers...

In 2008-2010 there was something that lit up the night sky like day over haldimand county in Ontario Canada

I saw a big one in the evening during army bootcamp. For a second or two it was as bright as day.

One of the guys says "wtf was that?" and another replied "it's a falling star" (literal term we use for shooting stars in our language).

A third guy asks, "so why do stars fall?". Silence.

I ventured, "uh, guys... stars don't fall. Stars are like the Sun, just really far away. What we saw was a meteor, a rock that flew through space and burned up when it hit the atmosphere."

Half the squad looked at me like I just said that babies are delivered by storks. I could tell they thought that was total bullshit but couldn't offer an alternative explanation and call me on it.

It was then that I realized how smart and educated the average person is. Army service was mandatory back then so everyone had to go.

For a moment I thought you are an Estonian, because we, too, call it a falling star. But our military service is still mandatory :(

We call it a falling star in English too (though “shooting star” is more common, at least in my experience).

I have never heard the term "falling star" before this thread.

Can second having heard "falling star" in English as well, though "shooting star" is more common.

Maybe a result of regional dialect/language exchange in high immigration areas?

Yeah, you have to make sure you put them in your pocket.

Save them for a Rainy Day. Never let it fade away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJlHWESyLI

\o/

Same in Poland - "spadające gwiazdy" - "falling stars". Even National Geographic uses this term[1] but exaplains in the lead: "Falling stars are meteores..."

[1] https://www.national-geographic.pl/artykul/spadajace-gwiazdy...

In Italian as well, "stella cadente".

From George Carlin in a standup: "Imagine how dumb the average person is. Half of them are dumber than that."

Yeah, but a lot of the population is clustered around the average so many of those half aren’t really much dumber than the average person (and of course a large number on the other side aren’t much more intelligent).

The 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?

relatively...yes

11.2 km/sec at a minimum. (Earth's escape velocity!)

It's not immediately obvious to me – why would escape velocity also be the minimum speed at which an object could enter the atmosphere?

Indeed. What if the object was traveling at the same speed as Earth as it revolves around the Sun, and their paths intersect at a very acute angle? That is to say, they met at a traffic 'zipper' ... Could an object collide with earth at a lower speed?

Yes, but it is rare because most objects in such orbits tend to either be gobbled by Earth right away, settle into L2, L3, or L4, or enter a high orbit.

No - because as they approach, Earth's gravitational field accelerates it.

Escape velocity is the velocity needed to reach an unbounded height from the surface, so reverse that timewise and any object free-falling towards Earth will have escape velocity upon reaching it.

Even if an object is moving in a parallel orbit to Earth's around the sun, if you "zoom in" to the point where it enters the Earth's sphere of influence, the influence of the sun is relatively small. It's roughly as if Earth and the object are free-falling together in empty space, with a small relative velocity. And Earth's escape velocity is the same velocity that would be reached by a stationary object "dropped" from infinitely far away. So relative to the Earth it will accelerate and hit the atmosphere with at least escape velocity.

(This is only an approximation, but it's a pretty good one because there's such a large difference between Earth's mass and the sun's.)

Another way to look at this is to simply observe that Newtonian physics is time-symmetric (neglecting effects like friction that dissipate energy). If you have a trajectory that arrives at the edge of Earth's atmosphere with a certain velocity, you can reverse it to get a trajectory that leaves with the opposite velocity (i.e. equal speed).

It's not the minimum possible, but it is the minimum typical case.

Escape velocity is the upwards velocity needed at the surface to reach an unbounded height with velocity zero. Run that in the other direction and you see an object that starts from infinity will reach Earth at escape velocity.

For that not to happen, you'd need something to perturb the object, slowing its fall or deflecting its velocity in some direction other than down. This can happen from the Moon, but it's not common given its small mass and gravitational field relative to Earth.

Have to hold multiple concepts in head at the same time.

If you're "far away" with gravitational potential energy and get "close" to the atmosphere that potential will have to go somewhere and it'll go into speed. Its like how, without a parachute on earth, falling 40 M means about 100 KM/h impact speed. And parachutes don't work outside the atmosphere so its retrorockets or hit pretty fast. Going from up there to down here means a certain velocity on the fall in.

Conceptually there is a calculatable difference between the speed "from infinity if the earth were not orbiting the sun" vs "from entering the earth's sphere of influence where the earth gravity matters more than the sun's gravity" but it turns out not to matter much. You're probably going to be coming in very fast from falling into the sun's gravity well. But even if the stars align and you hit the earth's influence at zero m/s (LOL good luck) you'll still hit the atmosphere "around escape velocity" after some rounding.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10

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

There's also the very low possibility of something just skipping along the upper atmosphere and ricocheting back into space.

Well presumably meteors travel at different speeds in outer space, and some meteors could be regarded as high speeds and others at low speeds. I don't think you necessarily have to be in synchronization with Earth's orbit to be considered low speed relative to some reasonable perspective.

You haven't accounted for the massive gravity well that is the sun. The difference in potential energy from infinity to the radius of Earths orbit is GMm/r. Set that equal to momentum (.5mv^2) and you get sqrt(2GM/r). Plug in the numbers and you'll see you can't really have a meteor that stumbled in from outside the solar system with a similar velocity to Earths orbit by the time it came down to Earths orbit. Put another way, if it was moving slow enough for the speeds to basically match, it would also be in an orbit around the sun similar to our own, and you'd have to account for the missing potential energy it had before entering our stars gravity well. If you want to argue it came from within the solar system, it would have to have already been in an Earth like orbit this whole time, so why don't we see it?

Orbital mechanics is considerably more complex than this because there are several over massive planets orbiting the Sun. Granted, the odds are very low of getting kicked into a trajectory that will just barely kiss Earth's orbit (at the right time), but it can happen. Not everything orbits in a conic. Also, extrasolar meteors are probably a lot more rare than the above comment would suggest.

That is so unlikely if it happened I would seriously consider the possibility of an intentional gravity maneuver by an alien race.

Near-earth asteroids periodically wander into temporary orbits around the Earth and then wander off.

https://earthsky.org/space/2020-so-mini-moon-asteroid-or-spa...

Thanks for the link.

"Strange space object 2020 SO was discovered on September 17, 2020, on approach to Earth. On November 8, it slowly drifted into Earth’s sphere of gravitational dominance, to become a new mini-moon. It’ll escape back into a new orbit around the sun in March 2021. During that time, it’ll make 2 large loops around our planet."

Why would it leave orbit if it already does 2 circles?

Think of them as increasingly elongated elipses and you can imagine the instability building...

They're orbits, but not stable ones. Not even really ellipses. By the time it's made one orbit-ish motion around the planet, the moon has moved relative to it. The second go around it gets affected by the new position of the moon. Eventually the combined effects of the moon and the sun's changing relative positions will nudge it out of orbit.

You all in the comments are rediscovering Lagrange points the hard way. L4 and L5 are stable, BTW, and we have a relatively famous space telescope at L2 which requires active stability control to stay there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point

Thanks. I wonder if something similar is responsible for the gaps in atomic orbitals.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Lagrangi...

This made me think how the moon's orbit remains stable after so many small objects fly around. I guess they are too small to be significant enough (obviously good).

For this to happen, it must have a low-enough potential energy to begin with. Otherwise, it will just shoot out the other side of the orbit.

In that case, most likely a meteor was already in orbit, and we just didn't know about it.

It has happened. Such orbits are not stable, due to the moon and sun's influence.

https://earthsky.org/space/2020-so-mini-moon-asteroid-or-spa...

Yes, relatively speaking.

First likely hit I found:

"Meteors enter the atmosphere at speeds ranging from 11 km/sec...to 72 km/sec ... The wide range in meteoroid speeds is caused partly by the fact that the Earth itself is traveling at about 30 km/sec (67,000 mph) as it revolves around the sun. On the evening side, or trailing edge of the Earth, meteoroids must catch up to the earth’s atmosphere to cause a meteor, and tend to be slow. On the morning side, or leading edge of the earth, meteoroids can collide head-on with the atmosphere and tend to be fast."

https://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-faq/

I wonder, if a meteor was moving very slowly (relatively) and basically just gently falling to earth, if we'd notice.

Yes. They are the largest source of extraterrestrial mass. https://www.sciencealert.com/5-200-tons-of-micrometeorites-a...

And one has been caught on film (we think) https://www.universetoday.com/110963/norwegian-skydiver-almo....

There’s also a nice coffee table book about them:

https://www.amazon.com/Search-Stardust-Micrometeorites-Terre...

Damn nearly getting cut in half by a meteor while skydiving!

"Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges...was an American woman known for being the first documented individual not only to be struck by a meteorite, but also to live through the encounter."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Elizabeth_Fowler_Hodges

> one has been caught on film

apparently it was just a rock[0]

[0]https://www.universetoday.com/111076/follow-up-on-skydiving-...

So this can't be a meteor then. That's not 11 km/s unless the video has been drastically slowed down.

I'm sure you've seen a plane traveling 400 mph but seemingly hovering in one spot in the sky. It's just not moving perpendicular to your vision.

Not sure what you're getting at but 400 mph is 0.178816 km/s. Off by two orders of magnitude from 11 km/s.

I am sure everyone has seen a shooting star. Planes don't move like shooting starts or whatever is in this vide.

I think it's safe to conclude that this is not a plane nor a meteor.

Here's another factor: When something is far away from you, it appears to travel slower. For example, the sun is ~150M kilometers away. As the earth rotates through a day, from our perspective it travels ~942M kilometers, meaning it appears to be traveling at 40 million kph through the sky. However, it's just sitting there in one spot.

I just read a page on meteors that said they tend to blow up starting around 300,000 to 200,000 feet or so.

If I make a wild-ass guess that the fireball was visible over a trajectory of about 100,000 feet, that's about 30 km.

At 11 km/s, then, it should appear for around 3 seconds.

I rewatched the video, which is 5 seconds in all, and it looks to me like the light is pretty close to three seconds long.

Aside from that, sure, it could've been slowed down, and could be at an angle, so it may all be a coincidence.

Neat! I hadn’t thought that through, but it makes sense.

The "relatively slow" 11 km/sec is still 39.600 km/h, or around Mach 30 (although that depends on air density and temperature), so still pretty fast I would say...

The scale of things in astronomy is humbling to say the least. "Close" can be 1 light-year away... That's 9.4607e+12 km. "Slow" is Mach 30. We're nothing at that scale.

There's no authoritatively correct reference for what "slow" or "fast" should mean in extraterrestrial contexts, however, I think it makes sense to look at it like this:

Suppose you were watching a (CGI) movie or a video of a meteor hitting Earth, with the whole globe on screen.

The diameter of the Earth is almost 13,000 km. So a meteor(oid) going even 70 km/s is going to take 3 minutes to hit from one diameter away.

It should look like it's barely moving on a planetary scale.

The website appears unresponsive, but it looks like the page describes a meteor from March 12:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230312184401/https://ams.imo.n...

"We received 103 reports about a fireball seen over CT, DE, MA, MD, NH, NY, PA, RI and VT on Sunday, March 12th 2023 around 01:01 UT."

Here is a thumbnail of the linked photo:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230315225532im_/https://www.am...

I 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 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 that I would've said flatly 'we don't get tornadoes here'. Never seen anything like it, before or since, nor even heard of it except for having looked into it then.

"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...

Exactly, I think the same, I was just commenting this too. I think it's more a statistical anomaly.

Citation needed. Oklahoma averages over 50 per year and is 2/3rds the land area of the UK.[0]

[0] https://www.weather.gov/oun/tornadodata-ok-monthlyannual

I assume the stat is actually that the UK gets more per unit of area than any other country except the Netherlands.

But also:

> the area from Berkshire into London had the highest likelihood of a tornado - one every 17 years.

What I saw was probably your UK annual 30-50 in a single small area all at once! Not huge, but many.

Yeah I'm from the Netherlands and I've seen several "tornadoes". However they're not the ones you see in the movies. They're real whirlwinds and I've seen them kill tents at campsites but buildings are generally fine. They come and go quickly.

They're high in number but I've never heard of one having a real mass-destructive effect like you see in the tornado areas in the US. I don't think we ever get that kind of thing.

I guess what makes us seem to have so many is not the actual occurrence of these but the high population density so there's always someone around to notice it. As opposed to some whirlwinds just spinning around in the desert.

I saw one maybe 10 years ago, I was outside at night and noticed it get bright. Looked up and there it was, or the last bit of its streak was. They aren't that rare apparently, but the big ones like in this video are rare: https://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/faqf/#2

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.

Are we having lately many more meteor sightings than "before", or is it just that we have better tools/more cameras to spot it?

People have had ubiquitous cameras in their phones for a decade, but these fireballs happen way too fast to whip out your phone. The reason that we're seeing them more these days is because of the increasing prevalence of dashcams and home security cameras.

That's probably why the Russian one is so well documented. They have a dashcam culture

One of my fave videos is of the Russian guy who keeps driving and pulls his visor down like nothing happened even while a meteor near-misses: https://youtu.be/5bicUPQHcw4

That's a more focused and responsible driver than I'll ever be.

Had. It was a fad related to the scammers on the roads, and peaked a decade ago. Scammers disappeared/shifted to something else, barely anyone drives with a dashcam now.

As a completely uneducated guess, I’d argue more cameras of decent quality, and more of them with motion detection etc.

There’s certainly a case for the more cameras argument, though it doesn’t apply to this specific event: almost every UK news article about meteors, lightning storms, and at one point a sonic boom from a jet, features a recording from someone’s video doorbell.

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 only one who saw it.

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.

> kind of weird when something so unusual happens and you feel like the only one who saw it.

I was camping at a river with some friends some time ago in the summer, and we saw some meteor drawing a huge long line in the sky, it lasted quite a bit of time. Enough for me to call for my friends to get up and look at it, and they both saw it as well. Could never find any news about it though. Never seen anything like it since then.

I saw a bright green huge one in Portland, Oregon USA in the 2004-2006 time period. Only tool I had was my eyes and brain to recall it (and I can still recall it well).

I told a few people about it and moved on. I’m guessing that’s the most common response.

Some relevant conversation at https://www.reddit.com/r/RhodeIsland/comments/11p0wyk/fireba..., which I found when I tried to find an archive link to the dead site by searching.

Might be worth noting this was a few days ago.

Fireball / bolide

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolide

Is it possible this is a satellite re-entry?

For example, this Starlink was predicted for re-entry a few hours before, on March 11.

https://aerospace.org/reentries/starlink-2350-id-47890-reent...

I've been fortunate enough to get a good look at two fireballs over the last 15 years. They're quite remarkable events, I can't recommend them highly enough...except of course I have no idea how one would seek them out.

I actually saw it! I checked all sunday for reports somewhere.

Where/ how can I add mine? I saw it going down the horizon - it was the most impressive meteorite I ever saw

Maybe those UFOs we shot down weren't just weather balloons from amateur clubs......

Good thing I've been playing a lot of XCOM recently.

On a more serious note is it possible this is another "Oh my god" particle event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle)

I'm not sure if there's any reason to think it's anything more exotic than a meteor.

Beautiful, for sure, but plenty of totally typical phenomena are beautiful.

I suspect that even at that energy level we'd not be able to see a single particle way high up in the atmosphere.

But I'm no physicist so who knows.

You're right.

Even if we could see it, it'd be more of an impossibly-brief flash of light that dumps all of its energy in one place.

It wouldn't be a weird fireball that moves across the sky.

I was riding my bike to the Longs Peak TH, outside RMNP at around 5:00am one winter - around 9,000' - clear sky. A streak just like this went across the sky. I figured it was either a roman candle or the start of WWIII. Neither turned out to be true. Good summit of Longs Peak, that day.

I was at the base camp of Challenger Point / Kit Carson Peak, laying out watching the sky after dinner. I saw something similar to this but a bit more green and it shot off sparkles like a firework as it burnt up. Did not make the summit the next day though!

Always amazing when these things happen when the sky is that crisp and clear, and you're alone!

I was actually in that general area about a year ago in the late fall and saw something very similar, except at the end it kind of "popped", like it disintegrated or exploded.

Is there a meteor shower or something visible there that these might be correlated with?

https://twitter.com/amsmeteors/status/1466787370477535239?s=...

This 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

First time I see this website. I love how there's a community for observations in the sky, and there's a huge list of documented sightings of the same event, with timestamps, names, multiple photos, etc. Lovely!

Meanwhile, ufo sightings have some shaky phone footage and a crazy dude saying basically "woah". I just love the contrast.

They're here. We have to stop them before it's too late!

Checks out, I saw a lot of little meteors last night

Can anyone estimate its speed just from that video?

What is it?

Looks like a meteor.

Or space trash, but I'm leaning meteor.

A meteor is just lonely cosmic space trash, looking for another body to make it feel accrete.

Does space trash look particularly distinctive when it makes back to earth? Human made space trash to be specific.

While flying, no but it might break up a bit more than a rock.

When on the ground it can be big enough for parts to be identified yeah.

Russian Oligarch.

That was a very, very high window.

ISS has windows, right?

The XP ones

Too soon...

Hadoken

Probably a weather balloon

Intercontinental missile being burned up in the atmosphere.

Credit Suisse CDS

it's called "The Sun" and you should ease on the magic mushrooms

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