Fireball Over Wales

nagora writes "After last weeks meteor strike on an Indian village, Astronomy Picture of the Day has a spectacular photo of a fireball over Wales. Come home to a real fire..."

Comments

Green fireball

[ballpoint]

On a summer evening in the center of Belgium some five years ago my brother-in-law and I saw a very bright, green-glowing (slashdot color, but much brighter) object zooming overhead from the south to the east. We thought a crash was imminent; it was quite threatening even if it didn't make any noise.

Unfortunately I haven't found any references to it anywhere. I'm pretty sure others must have seen it too.

This Wales fireball seems even more impressive though.

...Buy a cottage in Wales

[carndearg]

Very impressive picture, kudos to the kid who took it. I am curious to know though whether any of the pieces of the object would have made it to earth or whether in such events they merely pass through the outer atmosphere in a blaze of glory. I am guessing that a "sofa sized" object would have quite a lot of energy and would cause quite some destruction had it struck the earth in one piece.

"Come home to a real fire" in the context of Wales made me laugh though. Back in the 1980s it was the slogan used to advertise coal fires, and at the time the extreme fringe of the Welsh Nationalists were burning down holiday cotages in North Wales owned by absentees.

I cant remember who it was, might have been "Not the 9 o'clock news", ran a spoof of the coal fire ads, "Come home to a real fire, buy a cottage in Wales"

During the 2001 Leonids,

[JeanPaulBob]

I saw one meteor flash so brightly, a friend of mine saw his silhouette on the ground (he was adjusting the blanket he was sitting on at the time). The meteor left a debris trail visible for minutes afterward. A NASA image gallery has several pictures of the trail, including one animated sequence.