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(meteorobs) Point fireball observed in Texas last July



In the last couple of days I've heard from someone who, it 
appears, had an incredibly fortunate "point" or stationary
fireball meteor sighting at about 04:15 last July 27 UTC 
(11:15 p.m. Wednesday evening July 26 local daylight time).  
I'm now aware of online reports of more than a dozen people 
seeing this meteor from various locations between Austin 
and Houston, Texas, USA, and have made up a Web page with 
links to those reports:

 http://wwwvms.utexasdot edu/~ecannon/fireball20000727.html

The person I heard from observed the object as a nearly 
stationary ball of light about half the size of the full 
Moon that lasted about five seconds and was very bright 
(so that her husband saw the flash from his car as he was 
driving home).  At the very same time people closer to 
Houston saw a fireball to their west, and we around Austin 
saw it to our east.  One person in Iola, Texas, reported 
hearing a sonic boom three to five minutes after seeing 
the light.  The person who saw it as a stationary ball of 
light was in Fulshear, a small town in Bend County, Texas 
(29.690, -95.899), about 48 km (30 miles) southwest of 
Houston.

In one report, which appears on one of the other Web pages 
and which Lew Gramer forwarded to Meteorobs:

 http://www.egroups.com/message/meteorobs/16162

the person gave the date as Wednesday, July 26, and the 
time as 04:15:30 UTC.  I'm almost certain that this was a 
time/date mistake and that he saw the same event as all of 
the other reports, which was 23:15 July 26 local time but 
04:15 July 27 UTC.  (I recorded the time with a stopwatch
click calibrated to WWV as 04:14:41 UTC.  It went nearly 
straight down almost due east, and I estimated the 
magnitude as similar to one I had seen several days 
before, which was roughly -8 or -9.  It lit up the sky 
enough to lead my friend and I to turn quickly enough to 
see it before it burned out, and apparently it was 
something like 160 km or more east of us.  [I have been 
very remiss in that I still have not managed to submit 
fireball reports for those two or two others I saw last 
summer.  Sorry!  So much water going under the bridge...])

Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexasdot edu - Austin, Texas, USA
http://wwwvms.utexasdot edu/~ecannon/meteorlinks.html

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