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(meteorobs) Re: Fireball Sunday morning?
Wayne T. Hally wrote:
> a bright flash lit the southeast sky ...
> We'd love to know if it was a fireball.
Twice in the last year or so while out on clear nights, there
have been flashes so bright that in both cases although they
were behind me, they caught my attention and caused me to whirl
around to see what it was. In both cases (two different sites
but not too far from each other) the flash was bright blue and
the origin or center of it was below the horizon (one east, one
west). These were very bright flashes that lasted a couple of
seconds at least. In the first case I was taping a TV program,
and when I later played the tape, at the exact time that I
clicked my stopwatch on the flash, there was a five- or
six-second glitch on the tape -- it just played static for
those few seconds. So my guess was that this was some sort of
ground-level electrical event, such as a transformer explosion,
that affected the station's transmitter. (I've been told that
transformer explosions can be very bright.) In neither case
did I hear anything, and I assumed the second was similar to
the first. Also, in neither case did I hear or read any news
reports about the event.
All of that is just to say that maybe it's at least possible
that the flash Wayne saw was something like that.
Thank you to George Zay and Dave English for their replies to
my questions about peculiar meteors I saw!
Ed Cannon ecannon@mail.utexasdot edu - Austin, Texas, USA
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