[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
Re: (meteorobs) APOD Picture of Wales Fireball!
I have looked at the Wales fireball pictures. This doesn't look like a
meteor at all. At first glance it seemed like a picture cut-and-paste job
but Marco has shown that not to be the case. The entire event is obviously
in front of the cirrus clouds. A close look at the second picture shows a
sooty column of black smoke coming from burning hydrocarbons. The plane
explanation makes sense. I did not realize that fuel would take a couple
of minutes or more to burn up aloft, thinking in terms of a fuel-air
explosion that would consume it all immediately.
There is no hint of any contrail either. That would be up in the cirrus
clouds, not low in true altitude. What appears in the first picture looks
like a soot trail.
A couple of weeks ago Joan and I went to a grocery store shortly after
sunset, when the sky was very clear. We had to watch airplane contrails for
a short while because of their sunlit beauty, about six at a time. Planes
were over the Gulf of Mexico coming and going from Florida east coast
cities. One spot had some patches of dry air, for the planes crossing the
dry air would have clean breaks in the contrails. We watched three planes
produce the same contrail breaks.
Norman
Norman W. McLeod III
Staff Advisor
American Meteor Society
Fort Myers, Florida
nmcleod@peganet.com
The archive and Web site for our list is at http://www.meteorobs.org
To stop getting all email from the 'meteorobs' lists, use our Webform:
http://www.meteorobs.org/subscribe.html