Last night, I saw a fireball meteor. It saw it through cloud cover and the fact that there was a full/near full moon.
My question: Judging by those (sparse) details, how big do you think that meteor was when I saw it and how big was it originally, when it was a meteoroid drifting through space?
This one was about 15m across when it entered the atmosphere:
http://www.nature.com/news/russian-meteor-largest-in-a-century-1.12438
So probably smaller than that.
Most are the size of sand. The amazingly bright ones at night are more like gravel. Without more detail on brightness and thickness of cloud cover there’s not much more to say.
Holy cow. I either hadn’t heard about that when it happened or had somehow forgotten. I just watched a bunch of videos about it, including a clip of a PBS news show where Neil deGrasse Tyson was interviewed. Amazing and scary stuff. I wonder how many people in central Russia saw that and thought it was a nuke. I probably would have had a flashback to the Cold War if I had seen that. Yikes.
When this happened something a lot of us Westerners didn’t understand is how little reaction the Russian people seemed to have had*!* In most of the videos the people don’t do much of anything, they don’t stop their cars, they don’t scream or panic etc. Just that unflappable, ‘tough-like-bear’ Russian stoicism I guess.
That was also the start of the “Russian dash-cam” youtube craze.
Apparently, Russians see a lot of crazy while driving.
IIRC, the Peekskill meteor was about the size of a fist, and that was visible across the entire eastern United States.
So not much bigger than a chihuahuas head.
And with about the same number of brain cells.
One that was visible in the night sky last year in Texas was estimated to be four feet long and 4,000 pounds. About six years ago, I had witnessed one in the middle of the day that was estimated to be the size of a pickup truck.
Um, no.