So, I’ve heard that Astronomy is a boring hobby. Nothing ever happens. Yesterday however, put those comments to rest in a trash bin. Yesterday, fellow astrodude Hank had brother Andy call out of nowhere with news of a Big Bright Fireball in the sky near Edmonton Alberta… with Video!
Wow. He was videoing planes coming in for a landing at the Airport and caught a few seconds of the Great Prairie Fireball, along with more footage of the planes aborting landings. We took the 56 second .avi generated by the Canon Powershot A510 and split out the individual frames using HandyAVI. Once we had those individual frames (about 24/sec) we had HandyAVI recombine the first 50 images, which started during the event and a few frames past the end of the event, at 5 frames per second to make the video last a little longer.

credit: Andy Bartlett

credit: Andy Bartlett


fireball20081120 video
You can find all 50 frames and the short video at http://kingston.rasc.ca/fireball/. We checked the StarlightCascade Allsky Camera for anything but had nothing… as expected as we are far too far east to hope for a sighting.