Video Fail
Due to "crossdomain policy restrictions".
Did Reg mean this one? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAQxmhSJXfQ
Japanese star-gazers have been all a-buzz this week after a fireball lit up the night sky before crashing to earth in Saitama prefecture, a little north-west of Tokyo. News of the fireball started to flood Twitter in the early hours of last Sunday morning, 20 January, according to RocketNews24. The entertainment site has …
It worked for me, save that Flash kept asking permission to store local data on my machine - permission that was repeatedly refused. I wish the morons at Youtube (and the BBC, to take a momentary tangent) would realize that if I've said no, I am unlikely to have changed my mind five seconds later.
I happened to be driving on a dark country road one night a few years back facing in exactly the right direction when one of these fell about 200 km away along the Alberta, Saskatchewan boarder. It was pitch black. Try to imagine it turning from night, to full day light in about 3 seconds. It was literally like the scene were they turn on the sun in "The Trueman Show". My first though was is that what an ICBM going off looks like? My second though was to pull over, call someone, and make sure I wasn't going crazy. Pretty damned amazing sight.
"Try to imagine it turning from night, to full day light in about 3 seconds."
Hardly. This object had an apparent magnitude of -11, that's not as bright as a full moon. Or to put it another way, something like a couple of million times less bright than the sun.
Not daylight then.
I remember a decade ago, heading south toward Philadelphia. Just north of the city, a green fireball headed west to east for quite a bit longer than this one did. Same flaring, fragments coming off, to finally flare over New Jersey. Considering the angle, even money any sizable remnants ended up in the Atlantic Ocean.
Shortly after getting over the "wow! factor, I picked up my cell and called it in; "Zed, we have a bug."
Seem to be more common than is suspected.
I saw one in full daylight about 30 years ago. It was larger than a full moon and trailing flames - clearly audible (apparently this is some kind of widely reported phenomenon with large fireballs which makes stuff on the ground make noise) and went from horizon to horizon in about 3 seconds - too fast even for a supersonic jet and there was no sonic boom anyway.
That was nothing. I mean, literally nothing. I've experienced three in my lifetime, and actually saw two. The two I saw lit up the night like it was a bright sunny day. One was so bright it was like a nuclear explosion. That was before cell phones, internet, surveillance cams, etc..
We had one a few years ago that was so close that it made the ground shake, it registered as a small earthquake.