[meteorite-list] Belated Texas Fireball reports July/26/00

From: E.L.Jones <jonee_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:42:00 2004
Message-ID: <3A648C7A.D6EBA9CD_at_epix.net>

This repost from Meteorobs list has a collection of eyewitness reports
which, if plotted, might provide an area to target for some
Nininiger-style public education. The first link has several more
eyewitness links. Good Sleuthing.... Elton

Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2001 04:37:40 -0600
From: Ed Cannon <ecannon_at_mail.utexas.edu>
Subject: (meteorobs) Point fireball observed in Texas last July

In the last couple of days I've heard from someone who, it
appears, had an incredibly fortunate "point" or stationary
fireball meteor sighting at about 04:15 last July 27 UTC
(11:15 p.m. Wednesday evening July 26 local daylight time).
I'm now aware of online reports of more than a dozen people
seeing this meteor from various locations between Austin
and Houston, Texas, USA, and have made up a Web page with
links to those reports:

<http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~ecannon/fireball20000727.html>

The person I heard from observed the object as a nearly
stationary ball of light about half the size of the full
Moon that lasted about five seconds and was very bright
(so that her husband saw the flash from his car as he was
driving home). At the very same time people closer to
Houston saw a fireball to their west, and we around Austin
saw it to our east. One person in Iola, Texas, reported
hearing a sonic boom three to five minutes after seeing
the light. The person who saw it as a stationary ball of
light was in Fulshear, a small town in Bend County, Texas
(29.690, -95.899), about 48 km (30 miles) southwest of
Houston.

In one report, which appears on one of the other Web pages
and which Lew Gramer forwarded to Meteorobs:

 <http://www.egroups.com/message/meteorobs/16162>

the person gave the date as Wednesday, July 26, and the
time as 04:15:30 UTC. I'm almost certain that this was a
time/date mistake and that he saw the same event as all of
the other reports, which was 23:15 July 26 local time but
04:15 July 27 UTC. (I recorded the time with a stopwatch
click calibrated to WWV as 04:14:41 UTC. It went nearly
straight down almost due east, and I estimated the
magnitude as similar to one I had seen several days
before, which was roughly -8 or -9. It lit up the sky
enough to lead my friend and I to turn quickly enough to
see it before it burned out, and apparently it was
something like 160 km or more east of us. [I have been
very remiss in that I still have not managed to submit
fireball reports for those two or two others I saw last
summer. Sorry! So much water going under the bridge...])

Ed Cannon - ecannon_at_mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA
<http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~ecannon/meteorlinks.html>
Received on Tue 16 Jan 2001 01:01:34 PM PST