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A Strange Streak Imaged in Australia
Koyaanisqatsi writes "Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day presents a challenge worthy of a large audience: as it says, "Meteor experts don't think it's a meteor. Atmospheric scientists don't think it's lightning". An intriguing dark streak and bright flash that defies explanation showed up on some cloud monitoring pictures. The forumsetup to discuss it is currently hosed, so perhaps fellow slashdotters can shed some light over the mystery?"
That tiny rocket from Krypton preparing to crash land on that old coot Kent's farm!
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
Don't be alarmed. Okay, panic a little if your get your water from there.
Weird! I could see the streak until I wiped my screen with a Kleenex and the streak vanished!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
That was me.
I was trying out my new death-ray. I had it miscalibrated so that you could see it.
Don't worry about it. When death comes and strikes from the heavens for real, it'll be completely invisible.
-Ming the Merciless
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
There was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
Nothing to see here, move along folks.
J
> I, for one, welcome our new streaking overlords...
As long as they are hot attractive females, I got no problem with that.
2) a meteor
3) a meteorite (to troll the astronomy experts who will have to chime in and explain the difference)
I'll take the bait. For those of you who don't own a telescope or care about the awesomenessfulness of the cosmos, the beauty of Alphi Centuari, or the amazing moons of Jupiter, here's the difference between a meteor and a meteorite, in laymen's terms.
A meteor is a boy space rock, a meteorite is a girl space rock. When a metorite crashes into the ocean it is called an asteroid. Meteorite's that crash into land are called asterites.
I can only take my hypocrisy so far... please go edjucate yoursleves.
Obligatory Red Dwarf Quote:
"Oh god, aliens? Your explanation for anything slightly peculiar is aliens, isn't it? You lose your keys - it's aliens. A picture falls off the wall - it's aliens. That time we used up a whole bog-roll in a day - you thought that was aliens as well."
-- Lister to Rimmer about the Garbage Pod that Holly brought aboard to mess with Rimmer.
My god, that shit beats Nostradamus hands down.
They got the lamppost and everything.
Yes, an ancient, alien artifact, pregnant with long-dormant, world-ravaging evil, which will no doubt unleash terrible plague and death and destruction the world over, consuming the entire human race in an unimaginable apocalypse, only possibly averted by some unlikely everyman hero who has heretofore been overlooked by society but who will, no doubt, be immortalized by his deeds on the day the evil is returned to this artifact and banished forever.
Clear as day. It's right there in the photo.
Actually, additional analysis here shows a slightly more energetic explosion than the original image suggests.
Ok, it's really simple.
1) It's bright.
Bright things moving though the atmosphere tend to be very very hot.
2) It's durable.
Things that make it this far down tend to be be fairly substantial in nature.
So now we supposively have a bright, hot, durable object impacting a body of water at high speeds... THAT LEAVES NO TRACE AFTER IMPACT. Steam maybe? A ripple or two? Honestly, would somebody like to run a simulation on a superheated baseball sized rock slamming into the ocean at close to mach? Maybe a golfball to be conservative? Heck, I'm speculating the damn thing might explode just in temperature differential alone when it touches the water, if not angerly boil for a good long time.
The only conclusion I can specuate where it may have been any substantial object falling from the sky is that one in a billion chance it actually fully vaporized a second before impact. Even so, you'd still have some sort of audio event at those speeds, I'm imagining.
I'm going for visual artifact or an environmental lighting glitch myself.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Ah, but this was in Australia. In the Southern Hemisphere clocks run counter-clockwise (well, still clockwise to them), so time runs opposite of what it does in the Northern Hemisphere.
Just curious, how do you decide when to use a question mark and when not to?
Hey, near the flash...I...am I the only one that can see a faint outline of....ELVIS! The king HAS returned!
I read the headline and eagerly hoped for a picture of another lady running across a test match cricket pitch .... alas, it wasn't.
I think that one came from the George Lucas expanded edition of the original.
They welcomed our dark streaking, flashing non-terrestial overlords 2 years ago ... In Japan!
In Soviet Russia, dark streaking, flashing non-terrestial overlords welcome YOU!
In Korea, only Old People welcome dark streaking, flashing non-terrestial overlords
These aren't the dark streaking, flashing non-terrestial overlords you're looking for...
[/me waves goodbye to karma]
Required reading for internet skeptics