Posted on 07/24/2023 6:15:12 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: Meteors can be colorful. While the human eye usually cannot discern many colors, cameras often can. Pictured here is a fireball, a disintegrating meteor that was not only one of the brightest the photographer has ever seen, but colorful. The meteor was captured by chance in mid-July with a camera set up on Hochkar Mountain in Austria to photograph the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. The radiant grit, likely cast off by a comet or asteroid long ago, had the misfortune to enter Earth's atmosphere. Colors in meteors usually originate from ionized chemical elements released as the meteor disintegrates, with blue-green typically originating from magnesium, calcium radiating violet, and nickel glowing green. Red, however, typically originates from energized nitrogen and oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. This bright meteoric fireball was gone in a flash -- less than a second -- but it left a wind-blown ionization trail that remained visible for almost a minute.
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Wow.
Wow. Beautiful!
Very impressive! The universe never ceases to astound and amaze.
stunning........
This is a pretty decent documentary about the ‘Wow! Signal’, and the history of radio astronomy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjQUucV83w4
Absolutely stunning. Best photo of a fireball I’ve ever seen or in the skies.
If you stretch the picture, you can see several double- and triple star combinations.
Looks like copper, then barium and then lithium... A pricey rock that was!!
Maybe the Tesla that Elon launched into space has reentered the atmosphere.
Btt!
One morning, very early just before sunrise, when I was in the Marines at Camp LeJeune, we were headed out to the rifle range for that day's practice, when a huge fireball of GREEN streaked across the sky, totally silent. Took up nearly a quarter of the sky!................Must have been solid nickel.
Around 1989 or 1990 some fellow amateur astronomers and myself met at our dark sky site, set our telescopes up and waited for the sky to get dark.
After a while, we saw a tremendous fireball travel from East to West. I estimated that it took about 7 seconds to traverse the sky until it exploded and disappeared somewhere West of us. It lit up the countryside like daytime with a bright green glow. The smoke trail it left behind was visible for about 20 minutes afterwards. We never did hear anything about it afterwards.
Haven’t seen anything like it since.
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