Fireball! 2011 Dec 12th, 18:04 EST
We were contacted by local media this afternoon about a possible fireball Monday evening. But with no information about time, location, etc it could have been any of a dozen or more events appearing on the allsky camera last night. Most are airplanes and helicopters. Some are car headlight reflections.
However this turned out to be a true fireball:
The event is low in the west south west, just over the house.
We went back to take a look at the captured imagery after an email from Peter Brown of the South Western Meteor Network, stating they had picked up an event at 23:04:42 UT (18:04 EST). We checked and found the event low in the west south west just over top of the house. This was a 90 second exposure ending at 18:05:10 EST.
Our long exposures are due to the limited and old equipment we have, but we are looking at upgrades to provide a multiframe per second with GPS timing information to boot.
before – sco-20111212_1803_31.fit.jpg
during – sco-20111212_1805_10.fit.jpg
after – sco-20111212_1806_49.fit.jpg
all in 90 second exposures.
Here are the three images integrated into an animated .GIF (561kb)
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