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Meteor Spotted Yesterday Over Midwestern United States
the1337g33k writes "The National Weather Service is reporting that a fireball that many people witnessed last night is a meteor that entered the atmosphere last night around 10:10 pm Central Time. This meteor was spotted by many in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois."
It wasn't an Autobot.
Just a hint to any slashdotters in that area, a few of my friends a couple years back watched a small meteor impact up near Sonora Pass in California. It was close by so they took a weekend and went camping up on the pass. They wandered about relatively aimlessly looking for any rocks that seemed odd or out of place. When they found a suspect, they used some magnets they had brought to see if it was ferrous. Eventually, they found one small chunk of rock (think size of your hand) that the magnet stuck to out of sheer luck. They brought it back, had it evaluated by someone (can't recall who, but someone at a nearby university), and ended up selling it for just over $1000 since it was, legitimately, a small chunk of the meteor. If any dotters have a taste for adventure and have a weekend to kill near the area that this impacted, you should go out and see what you can find. It might pay off.
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The CNN article states that the fireball was visible for about 15 minutes. That seems awfully long for a meteor.
Fox11 News in Milwaukee has a dramatic video of the meteor taken looking slightly north of west in downtown Milwaukee, WI.
Any idea where it actually landed? DID it actually land -- or just burn up in the atmosphere?
I was on my way home last night very late, around 11pm and saw a meter streak about 1/4 the way across the sky. Normally I see them flash a white streak across the sky and burn up quickly, but this one stayed non-white burning stage for a long time and rather slow across the sky. I lost sight of it near the horizon and wonder if that one hit the ground. My location was south central west Indiana and looking east.
None of the video I've seen comes close to the spectacular sight. There was a huge tail of plasma and it was green, orange white with a hint of blue. It was huge and looked like it was close by.
I would bet that pieces will be found of the meteor. FIrst, the orbit / path will be well known, with so many multiple videos of it from different locations.
Second, astronomer Mark Hammergren, of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, predicts that it may have weighed as much as 1000 pounds.
"One of the misconceptions about bright meteors is that they're due to very tiny objects," said Hammergren. But "if something is bright enough to light up the sky like daytime and cause sonic booms throughout the entire area, it's big. It was major," he said. "If it was daytime, people would have undoubtedly seen smoke trails."
I think that this is very sound reasoning. Happy hunting to rockhounds in Wisconsin !
Now, why do we never get such multiple confirmations of UFOs ?
Please Help. My wife and I live in that area. Last night we were out past our usual time and we found a young boy. He was wandering out in the cold all by himself.
We've talked to the appropriate authorities, but we know we need to get the word out as much as possible. The doctors say he's fine, but he hasn't spoken a word yet.
Please take a look at his picture and call your local authorities if you have any information at all. We are desperate to find out who he is.
If nobody can legitimately claim him, we would be so blessed if we could adopt him. For now, Martha and I have taken to calling him Clark. Thanks.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
...burning the midnight oil doing something else other than that... Yeah, that's it.
What, filing their taxes late? I don't get it...
The orbit of this will be found very quickly - probably within 24 hours. That will rule in or out whether it was in Earth orbit.
Note that
- there are orbits for all satellites bigger than a few kilograms, secret or no. It's hard to hide up there and
- there have been number of multi-state meteors in the past. This, if a meteor, would not be very unusual.
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