[meteorite-list] Arizonans Bedazzled By Meteor

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Oct 3 15:51:16 2006
Message-ID: <200610031951.MAA16878_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1003meteor1003.html

Arizonans bedazzled by meteor
JJ Hensley and Senta Scarborough
The Arizona Republic
October 3, 2006

It was a plane going down. It was a helicopter's searchlight. It was a
large piece of space junk.

Wrong, wrong and wrong, astronomers say. That celestial body that
flashed across the Arizona sky after 10 p.m. Sunday was likely a
fireball, an extremely bright meteor.

Whatever you want to call it, the brief encounter with the unidentified
flying object made for an unforgettable minute for witnesses from Tucson
to Snowflake.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for both of us," said Scottsdale
resident Kip Wachter, who saw the fireball as he walked with his wife,
Valerie, near Pinetop-Lakeside on Sunday night. Wachter described a
fireball with bright green, red and white colors that made a low
swishing sound, like a hot-air balloon, when it moved overhead.

"It was pretty impressive," Ahwatukee resident Jeff Hartman said of the
fast-moving object. "It was probably moving about the width of a human
hand per second across the sky."

Eyewitness accounts were enough to prompt Rural/Metro Fire Department
staff to search for downed aircraft north of Saguaro Lake, but searches
found no evidence of an accident.

Scottsdale resident Dennis Alonso said the event was awe-inspiring.

"Both of us were talking and just went silent the whole time this thing
was in the sky, like we couldn't believe what we were seeing," Alonso said.

Those who caught Sunday night's show should consider themselves lucky,
said Robert Lunsford, operations manager with the American Meteor Society.

Lunsford said he regularly gets reports from eyewitnesses to similar
events from rural and urban areas around the country, but it still takes
good timing to see the spectacle in person.

So many people reported Sunday evening's incident because it occurred
early enough for witnesses to be out and about.

Sunday's presumed fireball also was larger and closer to the ground,
maybe as low as 50 miles up, for Arizonans to witness the flight path
instead of the more common meteors called shooting stars.

Many witnesses Sunday night reported an object that seemed to disappear
just over the horizon.

That was the assumption in the early 1960s when air-traffic controllers
at Sky Harbor International Airport contacted Carlton Moore, former
director of Arizona State's Center for Meteorite Studies, to report a
meteor that appeared to go down in north Phoenix.

"By the time I tracked it down, it was seen just north of Calgary,
Alberta," Moore said.

Wherever the fireball lands, Robert Ward and his meteor-hunting pals
from Arizona will be on a quest to find it.

Ward and his two partners were in Norway in August and found fragments
from the Moss Meteorite. The meteor burned through the atmosphere and
scattered through a Nordic village in July.

Ward said that once crew members get good eyewitness statements from
multiple states that allow them to estimate the object's flight path,
they embark on a mission for bits and pieces that fall from the
fireball's tail as it hurtles toward the ground.

"Normally, the smaller pieces fall first and the bigger pieces fall
further down the path. If you find a small piece, keep moving in that
direction," Ward said. "I would expect something pretty decent to come
out of this."

For good reason.

Sightings of Sunday's fireball were reported in Arizona, New Mexico and
Colorado.

Although witnesses to these cosmic events may seem rare, finding actual
space rock in the ground is rarer. A 0.945-ounce fragment from the
Norway find can fetch over $5,000 from collectors.
Received on Tue 03 Oct 2006 03:51:12 PM PDT