St. Thomas Fireball
By now you may have heard about the St. Thomas (Ontario) Fireball on Tuesday 2014 March 18th at 10:24pm.
http://meteor.uwo.ca/research/fireball/events/st_thomas/overview.html
Seven all-sky cameras of Western’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) together with two cameras operated by NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office located in Ohio and Pennsylvania recorded a bright fireball in the evening sky over the northern shore of Lake Erie.
The best image came from Camera #8 (top photo) located in Aylmer Ontario
The operator of this camera is Arthur Oslach. We got to see short clips of his observatory as well on the news.
Unbeknownst to us until after the event, our camera (#10 of the network) also caught this event, some 400+km away (bottom photo).
It was such a small event that it did not trigger on the software looking at our images, only when the big picture emerged did it come out in a data review.
You can see it in the upper left corner of this image, in the south west (north is down, west is left).
400-430 km is not a bad range. The fireball started at about 72km high and ended at about 32km high.
Because of the unprecidented number of cameras that recorded this event under great conditions, the possible meteorite fall area is relatively small and accurate.
Videos can be found here
http://meteor.uwo.ca/research/fireball/events/st_thomas/videos.html
with our local Yarker camera video here:
http://meteor.uwo.ca/research/fireball/events/st_thomas/videos/cam10_Yarker.avi
Search teams were out on the weekend scouring the area.
The fall map looks like this:
St. Thomas is located south of London Ontario near the north shore of Lake Erie.
These camera are low light video cameras with a GPS unit to add onto the frame a very accurate time per each frame. This allows very accurate orbital calculations and trajectory analysis.