[meteorite-list] Images of Wales meteor (no boring aeroplane)

From: (wrong string) ørn Sørheim <bsoerhei_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:28:21 2004
Message-ID: <200310042133.XAA10420_at_mail44.fg.online.no>

Hello Marco & List,
I wonder what you really are doing here, Marco?
Is this what you would call science or 'seeking the truth'?
Are you trying to find the best explanation, or is it something else?

That sometimes there are some conditions by a minority of aeroplanes
that come close to producing what was pictured does NOT mean that
you or anyone else has proven that that cloud in the picture
were made by an aeroplane that day.
You must clearly also explain why it can't be a meteor.
And you can't. Meteors do look exactly like that.

That you or Mr. Bone have by some reason made up your mind that you
don't think it is a meteor have no value for the rest of us, if you can't
come up with really good reasons why it was not produced by a meteor
with a terminal burst.

Bone says: No reports! No meteor!
I wonder why should people report it when there were good digital
pictures of it all over the place? And when it has been photographed on the
fastest and best media there is, it has been proven that it is for real.
And then it also should have been reported according to Bones's theory.
I wasn't. Bone MUST then come up with a new theory why there was no reports,
and that's HIS problem.
If some people photographed with their new fancy digital cameras,
CROWDS did of course see it. But if they all think like you that all things
movin' up in the sky are man made machines, then they would make fool of
themselves to take the big trouble to report it.

Bone and others seemed to have made some big mistakes:
They thought the orange head of the cloud was the terminal burst as it
happened, making the picture a true sensation. Added to that they made the
mistake to think it was huge, since on the picture it was huge. Mistake no. 2.
It was merely zoomed! No -20 fireball, sorry!! Just the average one.
I never thought it was the burst as it happened, but for me it also
looked big.
Anyway, case fall apart. No sensation. We're outta - here let's go.
We're making all fools of ourselves in front of the media.
The world comes tumbling down - but not the way we had thought!

THEN mistake no. 3 is comitted:'It's no meteor either, bloody exhaust
spewing old aeroplane..'
That IS the MOST serious mistake!!

Look at:
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0200wales/content_objectid=13474802_
method=full_siteid=50082_headline=-Nasa-in-a-spin-over-meteor-shot-name_page
.html

Here you find:
'...Jonathan, from Pencoed, near Bridgend, was taking action
photographs of his skateboarding friends when **they spotted
the orange ball of fire tearing across the evening sky**.'

'...Shortly after being praised by Nasa, proud shooting star Jonathan said,
"I was
skateboarding with my mates in the park when a little boy pointed into the sky
and said, 'The sun's exploding'.
"I looked up and **saw a fireball dropping through the sky** but I had no
idea what
it was. I grabbed my camera and fired off a couple of pictures.'

(**Stars courtesy by this author.)
We have here one report of a moving meteor, the orange ball, fireball dropping..
Is Mr. Bone interested in getting more reports, at this point in time,
I wonder?

There is one very easy way to prove it's a meteor:
Get the azimut and height (Az1,h1) of the first Jonathan picture from Pencoed.
Get the azimut and height (Az2,h2) of the Heywood picture from Porthcawl.
Not hard to do, but you must be on the spot. Might add that Pencoed and
Pothcawl is ~15.5 km apart.
Do the math, and find the distance and height where the sighting lines meet.
If the height is clearly inconsistent with the height of an aeroplane,
it is a meteor!
Very easy if you have those four numbers. I haven't obviously, but I reckon
Mr. Bone have them by now. What do they tell??

I also read the thread about this meteor on the uk.sci.weather ng.,
the majority were in favor of the meteor explanation, many of them
having seen bright fireballs, even daylight.
I bet they even have seen some clouds previously and a few aeroplanes contrails
in their lifes.

Regards,
Bjørn Sørheim


At 21:08 04.10.03 +0200, you wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I lived 20 years near to an airport too, jet contrails never end abrupt in
>> the sky. Tom is right.
>
>I'm sorry, but yesterday Dutch amateur astronomer Klaas Jobse posted a
>picture on the Belgian Astronomy mailing list of an aircraft contrail doing
>just that: stop abruptly. In fact, in the second picture you can see that
>the trail has multiple interuptions. Long time meteor observer Norman McLeod
>(AMS) posted this on Meteorobs yesterday regarding these breaks:
>
>"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."
>
>I think that covers it. I am sorry if this has interrupted anyones dreams:
>but the Wales event was a contrail, not a fireball. I should like to note
>that earlier in this discussion I was among those willing to think it
>showed a sunlit meteoric dusttrail (but certainly not the fireball itself).
>But the new image, which just shows a lot more than the zoomed picture, has
>made me change my mind. And firmly. Neil Bone was right.
>
>- Marco
>
>PS: one of the very mind-teasing suggestions done by two British on the BBC
>website, is that the glow at the end of the contrail migh result from a
>military aircraft dumping fuel and then igniting it with its afterburner.
>This seems to have been observed before. The other remaining option is that
>the glow is a refraction phenomena similar to a 'sundog'. Both could validly
>explain the glow at the end of the trail.
>
>
>----------
>Marco Langbroek
Received on Sat 04 Oct 2003 05:33:31 PM PDT