Fireball over the Midlands @ 00:39 on 29/20 March

[leolion]

I picked up a 'flutter' on Twitter last night of a bright fireball sometime prior to 0100 hrs (no actual times reported) from sources in Manchester , Harrogate area & Northampton.Peter Drew (Astronomy Centre-Todmorden) reported the object on the SGL Forum (observed visually at 12:40 am from his bed through a Velux window ). There are at least four visual reports on the Armagh logs arpc65.arm.ac.uk/cgi-bin/fireballs/browse.pl - scroll down. Alex Pratt (Leeds) recorded the object on video @ 00:39:13 UT through cloud & William Stewart at 00:39:10 UT. It looks a grand object and I believe ARP & WS will report further later.
I look to have found a video record from the Worcester area with a 2.1 mm lens (awaiting confirmation).

[arp]

I had significant cloud cover at that time, so I was fortunate to capture the object (attached). The meteor first appeared (in a gap in the clouds) at 00:39:13 UT on 2013 March 30.

It was very slow, lasting 6s on my video. Peak magnitude was perhaps -3, which would have made it appear as a fireball class event. As mentioned, stewartw also captured it, so we are analysing our 2-station data.

A curious meteor!

Alex.
PS The Attach option is now working!

Attachments:

[arp]

An initial analysis of the 2-station data captured by stewartw and myself gives the attached ground track.

The meteor travelled from NE to SW, was about 70km up when it first appeared in the video camera's FOV, was extinguished 6s later at a height of 50km, with a long ground track of about 70km.

More later,

Alex.

Attachments:

[BillW]

Hi,
Brilliant work gents, well done!
Cheers,
Bill.

PS. Thanks for the Armagh info, Len. Thats a useful resource.

[stewartw]

Hi All,

The videos are now up on the www.nemetode.org website.

The detailed analysis is proving a bit of a challenge due to the saturated pixels and low angular velocity ... but we're working on it!

Best regards

William