I was just out for a smoke in the back yard - at about 21.15 UCT - and as I gazed idly about me, I saw out of the corner of my eye a shooting star going “up” the sky (which I know is irrelevant - but normally when I see them, they appear to go “down” the inverted bowl of the heavens). This made me look up into the sky with more scrutiny than normal.
About a minute later, I saw the most amazingly huge shooting star I’ve ever seen. Venus is currently on the horizon, and this thing appeared to be about three or four times wider than Venus. It was also slow as hell. Went over the middle of the sky, and took about 30 seconds from first sight until it winked out. Not only that, but it was trailed by a huge swathe of sparks.
In the UK, the shooting stars I’ve seen before are mainly short scratches of white on the sky, and short-lived too. I’ve seen shooting stars from the Himalayas in Nepal and they were much longer - they went across half of the sky, but were still thin white lines. This thing, though, was wide.
Does anyone with more knowledge than I care to enlighten me on what I just saw?
No knowledge here, but where are you, just out of curiosity? (Guests’ location doesn’t show, darn it.) Apparently, I missed a hella fireball here a few weeks ago. I am never outside with a smoke at the right time. I will keep looking up, though.
I’ve looked on YouTube and the thing it most closely resembled is at 2:41 on this video, which, from the footbally players at the end of the segment, appears to be the beginning of the sighting of the Peekskill bolide - which went on to be much more spectacular than what I saw. But if you were to isolate one of the Peekskill fragments in other videos of the event, that’s pretty much what I just saw.
I saw something kinda like that back in July 2007: my wife and I were walking along Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina and saw the most spectacular shooting star I’ve ever seen. I posted about it here.
I saw a fireball back in the mid-80’s one night as I was driving back to college from home. They really are an awesome looking sight, and I saw news reportsof its sighting from all over the southeast US.
I saw one from a Big Boy’s in the mid-90s. It was greenish and lit the cloud cover up, until it broke through. I heard it landed somewhere in one of the Great Lakes… it’d have to have been either Lake Saint Clair, or Lake Erie. We were too far south for Huron, I suppose. It was really cool. The group I was with tried to drive around to look for it, but you just don’t realize how far those things are away from you.
I will keep looking up, though.