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(meteorobs) Fireball observations...

Hello,

I don't know much about "fireballs" or meteorites, but like a lot of
people I do find the phenomena interesting.  My subscription to this
list, and the purpose of this message is to maybe find out a little more
about some things I've seen with my own eyes.  Everyone sees meteorites
falling in different ways, but from what I can gather, I have seen a few
things that I have only recently realised are among the more rare of
sightings.  I guess I deduced that from what I've been reading around
the place.  I appologise in advance to those researching fireballs that
I did not note dates or such... I don't usually regard natural phenomena
such that I need to report it.  So, to cut to the chase, here's the
interesting phenomena that I have seen :

The first was somewhere around late 1985 or 1986, near Moura in central
Queensland.  It was fairly late afternoon, maybe 5:30, but it was
summertime and the sky was still bright blue and it was cloud-free at
the time.  I happened to be looking out of a window while standing in a
friends house when an extremely bright-yellow "shooting star" came
straight down from the sky and seemed to burn out before hitting the
ground, somewhere not too far past the horizon (the horizon being a
range which was only maybe 20 km away).  It didn't seem to be a great
distance away, the smoke trail was thick and dark, and the smoke
billowing patterns in the trail were clearly visible.  The initial
object was probably 1/2 to 3/4 of the size of the sun as we see it from
here.  That's about the extent of it.  There was no noise that I could
hear from my vantage point.  I guess the notable thing about that
sighting is it was in clear daylight; I've since been told that's a one
in a lifetime that few will get to observe.

The second I'm convinced was not a meteorite (but what would I know?)
because it was actually moving relatively slowly horizontally at what
seemed to be an extremely high altitude.  This one I saw at night-time,
maybe 9:00 at night.  I was driving at the time, so I could not focus
all my attention on the object.  It seemed relatively large and I could
actually see 'flames' around the perimeter of the fireball as it moved
slowly across the sky.  To me it looked that the fireball was burning
blue.  I thought about it, and there was a standard blue tint along the
top of the windscreen which could explain the blue colour, but I did
bend forward slightly and look up, still seeing the blue colour, so
perhaps that was the true colour of the burn.  It seemed to be moving
quite slowly at what seemed to be such a long distance.  Nothing more
notable about that, the object seemed to burn out.  Maybe it could have
been some space junk coming back to earth.

The last one I saw was very spectacular, almost paling the Moura
daylight meteor into insignificance.  This one was sometime during late
1999 in Brisbane, at around 7:30 at night.  I was sitting on a
third-story balcony at my unit near Ballymore stadium when I caught
something out of the corner of my eye coming from the sky to my right.
As I turned my head to focus, it had already covered most of the
distance on its east-west trajectory, and at first I didn't know what to
make of it.  At first glance all I saw was what seemed to be a huge
cylindrical shaped object travelling faster than anything I'd ever seen.
During that first glance, the front of the object was quite bright, and
the cylinder was glowing a soft blue.  It came straight across the sky
in front of me, still travelling extremely fast, and it actually came
through and underneath the light, wispy clouds which were around at the
time.  It was then that I could see the object for what it really was.
It was something that had entered the atmosphere and somehow travelled a
horizontal trajectory for all that distance.  The sky was relatively
clear to the right which is why I saw it coming from so far; the wispy
clouds were more to the north in front of me, and they were thin enough
to be fairly transparent.  The object took on the cylindrical shape
because whatever it was carried a fairly thick vapour trail with it, the
thickest being maybe at least a couple of hundred feet long, and I judge
maybe 15 to 25 feet in diametre.  The glow of the object somehow lit up
the cylinder of vapour to make it look solid.  It wasn't an untidy,
billowey smokey trail as I saw with the meteor I described from Moura -
the vapour trail seemed to be quite uniform and 'neat' in its shape.  As
I watched it come below the cloud line, I could see sparks and bits of
fire coming off the bright object at the front of the cylindrical trail
until it vaporised into nothing maybe only 1 to 2 km in front of me,
leaving the vapour trail in the night sky.  I could roughly guess the
distance, because there was a helicopter hovering not far from where the
object fizzed out.  If the pilot saw what I saw it would have been
memorable for him because of the close proximity (I'd guess the object
fizzed maybe less than one kilometre from the helicopter).  There was no
sound associated with the object at all.  I could estimate that it was
initially travelling many times faster than the speed of sound because
of the short time it took to cover the huge distance from the far-right.
It had lost a lot of momentum by the time it was travelling directly in
front of me, but I have seen tracer fire from an M60 which was nowhere
near that speed (from memory, an M60 bullet travels at somewhere near
2,500 km/h).  The thing was like a huge guided missile moving across the
sky, that's the best way I can describe it.

Anyway, I think the first two things I saw are pretty standard
phenomena.  I haven't read any meteor stories which are anything like
the thing I saw in Brisbane.  Can someone shed some light on what I saw
in Brisbane just for my own curiousity?  My own guess is that it was a
large meteor that would have struck the earth had it taken a downward
trajectory.  Comments on any of these phenomena I saw are welcome, I'd
like to know more about these things which I may never see again.  Sorry
for the long post which probably holds no real scientific value or
interest.  Thanks!

Regards,

Troy Simpson
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