Thursday, October 28, 2010
A Meteor Shower from Comet 103P Hartley?
A couple of unusual fireballs have astronomers speculating that there might be a meteor shower from comet 103P Hartley. The comet has come closest to Earth than any other comet fro a long time, and some of its dust trail might cross the Earths orbit. While it's a long shot, look for meteors in the constellation Cygnus on the nights of November 1 and 2. Read the full story here.
Labels: comets, Meteors, unaided eye observation
# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 6:47 am 
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on the morning of October 28, 2010 around 6:30am in Pasadena, Texas i saw a red meteor as i looked the window, i right then thought it was the end of the world but it didnt hit. is there any explanation to what i saw and if it were a meteor why didnt it hit? answers would be nice..
# posted by 
: 2:53 am
: 2:53 am
What you saw is a fireball, a relatively rare but very bright meteor, it could have been a bit of random space debris or it could have been a meteor from the Orionid meteor shower.
Meteors are typically very small, material smaller than a grain of sand, a typical meteor burns up in the atmosphere.
Bright fireballs which can be seen in daylight are larger, around pebble size or a bit bigger. These can survive re-entry, but around 300 Km above the earth they are now falling slowly enough that the "re-entry burn" disappears. So yur meteor may have hit, but you wouldn't see it, and finding it would be a non trivial task.
Meteors are typically very small, material smaller than a grain of sand, a typical meteor burns up in the atmosphere.
Bright fireballs which can be seen in daylight are larger, around pebble size or a bit bigger. These can survive re-entry, but around 300 Km above the earth they are now falling slowly enough that the "re-entry burn" disappears. So yur meteor may have hit, but you wouldn't see it, and finding it would be a non trivial task.
i am curious to ask, are these types of situations recorded or are they not major enough to worry about?
because i was site surfing and i found nothing about a warning of the fireball.
thank you for your answer, i hope the collision doesn't make a big impact.
because i was site surfing and i found nothing about a warning of the fireball.
thank you for your answer, i hope the collision doesn't make a big impact.
# posted by : 2:50 am
: 2:50 am
Although I love meteor showers, I haven't been keeping up on them lately because I now live in the Pacific NW of the USA and the skies are usually cloudy. At about 3:30 am on Nov. 3 (yesterday), I was up working on my computer and something caught my eye out the window--there I saw the biggest brightest fireball I have ever seen--had multiple colors along a flaming long trail and it very slowly dropped below the treeline. As soon as I saw it, I began to search the internet to see if anyone else had seen it, and then I found the articles about Comet Hartley. I'll file a report on a meteor site and hope that someone saw it too! (And I'm going out to look again.) --Angela
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