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)

Other links:


  • More information is available from

  • http://lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com/2011/12/canada-ne-usa-bolide-meteor-12dec2011.html
  • http://meteor.uwo.ca/research/fireball/events/selwyn/overview.html