(meteorobs) Re: Very bright fireball over central Texas

Ed Cannon ecannon at mail.utexas.edu
Wed Aug 2 22:07:07 EDT 2006


The local TV station's story page about this event now has
their 6:00 PM report, which includes a police car dashboard
camera video of the fireball and a few seconds of yours
truly, along with his stopwatch that still said "05:09.21"
(i.e., 04:05:09.21 August 2 UTC) saying it was a natural
fireball:.

http://kxan.com/Global/story.asp?S=5230270

The comments at the end of the story include one from
Liberty Hill, TX, signed "the Duke Family" that may amount
to a report of a sonic boom.  One of the later ones is
from an observer in Texarkana, hundreds of miles to the
NE, saying that he saw the southwestern sky light up twice
at the time of the fireball.

That leads me to mention something from a couple of weeks
ago.  My observing buddy and I were at our suburban site
and both saw a bright flash light up the sky.  We thought
it was likely a fireball somewhere.  Then about eleven
minutes later there was a very similar flash!  So then we
thought it might be lightning.  (Sometime later there was
a third, much fainter flash.)  The problem was there was
not really any lightning type within quite a long way
around.  Well, then, in e-mail with the local astronomy
club, someone at the observatory about 55 miles (88 km)
northwest of our site reported that he saw the flashes
also.  So my observing buddy then thought that with the
weather not seeming to support lightning, maybe they
were fireball flashes.  But I was at a loss as to whether
or not to report such ambiguous or uncertain data.  I did
get exact times for the first two flashes, but that was
all.

Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA



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