[meteorite-list] FIreball in Florida Tuesday night

From: lebofsky at lpl.arizona.edu <lebofsky_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 06:33:13 -0700 (MST)
Message-ID: <b8642b819a2619c27adee4ef5a6956a6.squirrel_at_webmail.lpl.arizona.edu>

Hi Everyone:

A friend of mine (Greg Beckner) in Gainsville, FL just sent me this. He
was out with a group of scouts and saw the following (second paragraph):

I took my Cub Scout pack to the model airplane field last night & showed
them a few R/C aircraft. A sidebar to that is the field is several miles
out of town and has a good view of the horizon and darker skies, so I also
took the telescope. We saw Mercury about 5 deg from Venus last night & a
few deep sky objects at the last part of Astronomical twilight & before
moon came up.

Around 9:30 local time, while packing up, I saw the most impressive
fireball meteor almost directly to the south. It started like an Iridium
flare, but just got brighter & brighter. It was close
enough where you could see a flame structure and fragments breaking off.
Will the next "Meteorite Men" episode be filmed here??? So far, nothing
in paper yet. Is there something that keeps track of such events? I'm
sure we weren't the only ones seeing it (*it scared the crap out of my
kids!!!)


Here's GPS cords of flying field - I was looking Almost Due South - maybe
just a
little to the East of due South. Time was perhaps between 9:20 & 9:40pm
EDT. Path of the object was almost straight down & it was about 35 deg
up...

N 29? 31' 07"
W 082? 33' 32"

Larry
Received on Wed 31 Mar 2010 09:33:13 AM PDT