UT: Huge Fireball Seen Over 7 Midwest US States

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UT: Huge Fireball Seen Over 7 Midwest US States

Post by bystander » Thu Apr 15, 2010 3:40 pm

Huge Fireball Seen Over 7 Midwest US States
Universe Today - 15 April 2010
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4tbmL_C ... r_embedded[/youtube]
Nancy Atkinson wrote:Lots of buzz this morning about a huge fireball seen late April 14, 2010 over at least seven midwestern US states including Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois (that's where I am!) The video above was taken from the dashboard camera of a police vehicle in Howard County, Iowa, which is near the Minnesota border. Another video, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison caught the meteor. The flash even showed up on a National Weather Service Doppler radar image from the Quad Cities in Iowa. The image shows the fireball's smoke trail caught at 24,000 feet (the small squiggle near Grant and Iowa counties.) Several reports (this one too!) of booms, shaking and flashes have been posted online. Did you capture any images or video? First, you might want to contact the International Meteor Organization, a nonprofit that watches over amateur meteor sightings. But we'd like to see them too! Post a link in the comments or send an email to me.
Huge fireball over Wisconsin!
Bad Astronomy - 14 April 2010

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Space: Massive Fireball Lights Up Wisconsin Sky

Post by bystander » Thu Apr 15, 2010 9:29 pm

Massive Fireball Lights Up Wisconsin Sky
Space.com - 15 April 2010
A flash of light lit up the night sky when what was believed to be a space rock burst across southwestern Wisconsin on Wednesday, according to news reports.

An image captured by a camera mounted on the northwest corner of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus shows the meteor as a bright dot moments before bursting into a spectacular fireball.

The photos were taken at around 10:07 p.m. on April 14. According to news reports, the burst illuminated clouds and the contrails of airplanes, which is the visible concentration of water droplets from the atmosphere that occur in the wake of an aircraft under select conditions.

The fireball was seen moving west to east, and was visible across northern Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, in addition to southern Wisconsin, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

NOAA also received several reports of a prolonged sonic boom from areas north of Highway 20, along with shaking homes, trees and various other objects. The fireball reportedly broke up into smaller pieces and was lost from sight well before it reached the horizon, and it is unknown whether any pieces of the object actually hit the ground.
Image
Moments before bursting in a dazzling fireball over southwestern Wisconsin, a likely meteor appears as a bright
dot in the Wednesday night sky. This image was captured around 10:07 p.m., April 14 by a camera mounted on
the northwest corner of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison
campus. Credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Image
A dazzling flash of light fills the sky over southwestern Wisconsin when what is believed to be a meteorite burst
around 10:07 p.m., illuminating clouds and contrails from airplanes. Credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Re: UT: Huge Fireball Seen Over 7 Midwest US States

Post by geckzilla » Fri Apr 16, 2010 11:38 am

Absolutely amazing!
Just call me "geck" because "zilla" is like a last name.

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Re: UT: Huge Fireball Seen Over 7 Midwest US States

Post by neufer » Fri Apr 16, 2010 12:21 pm

Art Neuendorffer

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Re: UT: Huge Fireball Seen Over 7 Midwest US States

Post by neufer » Sat Apr 17, 2010 3:22 am

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-meteor-hunt-2-20100416,0,4421786.story wrote:
Rocking out, meteorite hunters make rare find in Wisconsin

A Chicago-area man and his two sons report the first recovery of a meteorite from the fireball that the night sky over much of the northern Midwest on Wednesday.

LIVINGSTON, Wis. — As dozens of meteorite hunters converged on southwest Wisconsin on Friday, a Lake Forest man and his two teenage sons stumbled upon what all of them had traveled hours to find. After they stopped to talk to a farmer, he showed them a small rock that had bounced off his shed roof the night before, shortly after a fireball exploded in the sky. It was one of two such finds that made the Boudreaux father and sons the first to report the recovery of pieces of meteor that fell near this tiny rural town after lighting up the night over much of the northern Midwest on Wednesday. One of the specimens, weighing 7.5 grams, was analyzed by a geologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who confirmed it was only the 13th known meteorite ever found in Wisconsin and the first in 50 years. The other, at 11 grams, was bought for $200 by Terry Boudreaux, 49, a retired health care industry executive who often shares his finds with the Field Museum's Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies. "I do this for the thrill of holding something that has traveled for billions of years in space," said Boudreaux, who had stayed up all night Wednesday studying radar maps so he and his sons could be among the first on the scene.

At least two dozen other meteorite hunters — professional scientists and amateur collectors looking to cash in on the valuable treasure — have arrived in the area from as far away as Arizona. After zeroing in on this chunk of farmland using radar and computer readouts, many of them gathered for reconnaissance at a gas station-convenience store off state Highway 80, just north of town.

Until darkness Friday, the hunters canvassed a private farm a few miles outside Livingston, scavenging for tiny fragments of rock as the sun set overhead. Armed with metal detectors and powerful magnets, they planned to pick right up again at dawn on Saturday.

"There are probably hundreds to thousands of pieces scattered out there," said Boudreaux, adding that the big prize would be the intact center of the meteorite. "Finding a meteorite (fragment) is rare enough. Finding the main mass is much, much rarer."

For many of them, the motivation was knowledge that a golf ball-size rock in good condition could fetch $10,000 or more on the open market. For others, it was pure science.

"Meteorites are the building blocks of planets, so yeah, this is a pretty big deal," said Paul Sipiera, an adjunct curator of meteorites at the Field Museum, who also had rushed to the scene from his home in Galena. "The interest is trying to understand how the Earth came to be."

Boudreaux's finding of the two small pieces was an important clue about the location of the strewn field, the impact pattern made on the ground as fragments of the exploding meteor fall to Earth. A meteor is a piece of space mineral orbiting the sun, and a meteorite is a fragment of the meteor that survives the fiery plunge to Earth. John Valley, the University of Wisconsin geologist who analyzed one of the recovered chunks, said he and his team were thrilled by the sky fall. They confirmed it was a 7.5-gram meteorite. "To have it filmed as it fell and picked up on Doppler radar as it came down is a really exciting thing," he said. "We hope that we can eventually keep this sample or get another one for our permanent collection, allowing us to do far more detailed analysis on it."

Boudreaux said that when a friend alerted him in Lake Forest to news of the fireball Wednesday, he sat up much of the night collecting information, then took his sons, Christopher, 17, and Evan, 13, out of school Thursday to drive to Wisconsin. They spent six hours crisscrossing rural roads, stopping to examine likely-looking rocks, talking to farmers, shopkeepers, police officers and anybody they met, he said. They asked them to be on the alert for meteorites and handed out fliers on what to do if they thought they had found one. At 4 p.m., they stopped to talk to a farmer exiting a shed.

"You see those chairs over there?" Boudreaux said the farmer asked him, pointing to yard chairs by his driveway, "About 10:10 last night, I was sitting there having a beer with a friend, and the sky exploded over my head. The entire sky was like daylight. "About 20 seconds later, a rock hit the roof of the shed next to me. We got a flashlight, looked around and found it."

As they talked, the farmer's neighbor drove up and asked Boudreaux to look at another rock, he said, but it was a piece of asphalt. That farmer went back and found an actual meteorite, beside his garden hose. That second farmer agreed to sell his specimen to Boudreaux only on the condition that Boudreaux bring it to a local school next week for a lecture to local children fascinated by Wednesday night's fireball. Boudreaux told him he'd do one better: bring along specimens from "all kinds of meteorite falls from all over the world from my own collection."

Among the other hunters on hand was Tim Heitz, 58, a retiree and amateur collector who had rushed up from St. Louis. He said he hoped only "to find enough to pay for my trip. The old joke in meteorite hunting is people telling you, 'Don't quit your day job. You'll be a starving son-of-a-gun.' "

Also there was Joe Kerchner, 31, who said he has made meteorite hunting his full-time job since losing his job months back. Based on eyewitness accounts from farmers and radar readings, he believed that meteorite fragments could be spread out over nine miles. Kerchner said the hunters often cooperate, but only to a point. "We all work together and share information until one of us gets a hot lead," he said. "At that point, you just stop hearing from them."

Boudreaux and Sipiera said they expect to canvass about 1,600 acres of farmland over the next several days as interest in meteorites intensifies in this area. "Because this is a fresh fall, there's already a tremendous amount of interest in it," Sipiera said. "Every time you find one you're hoping it gives you clues to the origins of life.">>
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Re: UT: Huge Fireball Seen Over 7 Midwest US States

Post by bystander » Sat Apr 17, 2010 6:46 am


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