Posted on 02/25/2007 7:31:18 PM PST by Sender
Sorry for the shameless vanity, but I was just outside in the back yard in Northern Georgia, and an incredibly bright light illuminated the dark yard like an arc lamp. I looked up and saw a meteor streaking overhead, white hot, which then broke up into orange, glowing fragments. This happened at 10:21PM EST. I apologize for posting something random like this, but it was astonishing. Perhaps it was a piece of space junk that reentered the atmosphere tonight. Did anyone else see this? It was truly spectacular.
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Go eat at Smokin' Stevie's BBQ on Mars Hill. It's great.
Most likely "space junk." We use to see space junk coming through the atmosphere back when we lived in rural Kansas. It's a lot flashier than a meteor, tends to follow the horizon, and disintegrates before falling to earth.
You're very fortunate. I don't think very many people actually get to see a significant meteor in their lifetimes.
Some years ago I was driving north out of a major US city in broad daylight when suddenly a meteor blazed across the sky right in front of me. As I recall I'm pretty sure it ended with a fireball too.
Fun thing is, I was actually able to keep a video of it because someone else in the city happened to have a video camera pointed at the sky when it blazed across, and it appeared on the evening news. Because they advertised they were going to show video I grabbed a VCR tape. Still have the tape.
Stevie ... is that you?!
Right near Lake Sidney Lanier, about 35 miles N of Atlanta.
Yes, completely silent. Blindingly bright.
That sounds about right.
Seems I remember that soon after the Chicoms blew up their satellite, the main camera on the Hubble failed. Coincidence? I think not. We should send them a bill for the service call.
Didn't the chicoms just launch a satellite?
we like it ok, but home cooked is still best.
my wife loves the nascar theme...
lol, not quite
It made me think of the unknown. All the things that are zooming out there in the blackness toward some atmosphere. This thing was a major visitor.
Actually that was my first thought, that this was a firework shot by neighborhood kids. But it was silent, and much too bright to be possible.
I've been an amateur astronomer since I was a kid (yes, one of those geeks who sits outside in the dark looking at the stars through a telescope) and random meteors can be seen on any night. If you're patient, you can see at least a few every hour. Most of these meteors (also called shooting stars) appear about as faint as the background stars and are caused by small rock fragments in space about the size of a grain of sand, burning up from friction with the Earth's atmosphere as the Earth moves along its orbit at a speed of tens of miles per second.
Very bright meteors are caused by larger pieces of rock, and the brightest ones which light up the sky all around and break up into glowing fragments that sometimes reach the ground as meteorites are caused by boulder sized rocks. I've seen perhaps a dozen of these in the past 30 years of stargazing and they are among the most beautiful sights that nature produces.
I am 32 years old and have never seen anything like it...maybe it was a flying welder?
I am 51 years old and have never seen anything like it. Maybe it was a Democrat reentering the atmosphere?
It was very beautiful. From the look of it, nothing reached the ground as a meteorite.
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