Loud Boom! that was not Susan Ivanova*
Woke up Sunday morning to twitter and web reports of a loud noise Saturday evening, 2016 Sept 24th around 20:50 edt.
http://www.kingstonregion.com/news-story/6877053-mysterious-boom-startles-south-frontenac-residents/.
Local television also covered the story: http://www.ckwstv.com/2016/09/25/128535/
The first thing we typically do each morning is to get some coffee, sit down and review the nights Allsky1 and Allsky2 imagery, looking for bright meteors (fireballs or bolides).
Both cameras image throughout the night, and after daybreak, process, annotate and store the data locally, then upload to this server. The local data was fine but there was a data upload glitch that was finally resolved only this morning (Mon Sept 26). In the meantime I manually uploaded the Sat/Sun run and then took a look through them.
Unfortunately, there was no evidence from either camera for a bright meteor event.
Allsky1 takes images throughout the night, each exposure is 80 seconds, followed by a 10 second dead time for the image to download from the camera to the computer. So in theory, this camera could miss events. It has been running here for 10 years and the camera is even older than that, donated to us from the folks that run the Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Allsky2 is provided by the University of Western Ontario Meteor Physics group and is more modern. It images continuously from dusk to dawn at up to 30 frames per second, and then processed by software looking for fireballs specifically. However, since it is looking for a specific behaviour, it identifies and then discards things like satellite, airplanes, helicopters and more. Because of this, there is a small chance it too may miss an event.
We looked through imagery in and around Sept 24 at 20:50 EDT (Sept 25 00:50 UT) for 30 minutes either side of that time and found nothing.
This is the image that should have had the event at 20:50 ish:
With Allsky2 there was a small event at 00:38 UT (20:38 EDT) and another at 01:05 UT (21:05 EDT). Coincidentally there was a larger meteor caught at 01:50:15 UT (21:50:15 EDT), almost exactly an hour later than the reported time. So we carefully checked our Eastern Daylight Time to Universal Time conversions, doubled check the time stamps on the images and the system times on the computers and came to the conclusion that the 01:50 UT event was just a coincidence… the time was correct.
This is the nightly summary of events detected by allsky2. North is up, west to the right. The brightest meteor in the west was the 21:50 EDT event, the slightly dimmer one in the center top was 05:43 UT or 01:43 EDT Sept 25th.
We also reference the American Meteor Society for visual sighting reports. Checking the events section there is only one listing for the Ontario region, at 01:49UT (21:50 EDT)
Event 3582-2016 30 2016-09-25 01:49 UT 2016-09-24 21:49 EDT CA US MI, NY, Ontario, MA, OH, Québec
There is another listed in the pending section for the correct time but sound was not heard.
3582ag 2016-09-25 00:50 UT 2016-09-24 20:50 EDT CA Athens Ontario ≈3.5s -13 – – – Correia A 4
So we can be pretty sure there was no visual eye witness observations of a meteor at that time
The last step we are following up on, is to pull the raw footage from around the estimated event time and inspect it manually.
* Susan Ivanova Boom reference
** Updated Sept 27th. We reviewed 15 minute either side of the 20:50 EDT event of the raw video and did not see anything that could account for the event.