Here's the image. What he's probably looking at is a large piece of space junk -- rocket upper stage, probably, or perhaps a dead LEO satellite, burning in.
The "corkscrew" pattern would be caused by the tumbling of the body.
Off-topic, I saw a beautiful fireball last night -- really big and bright.
Suppose a meteorite is a composite of two different materials; one glows much brighter at a given temperature.
If such an object is spinning twoards the Earth, would it not look like such a corkscrew?
Need to get the Stargate Command Team to check it out.
That was me the night I mixed a bottle of Three Roses with a bottle of Pept-Bismol......
In the photo, at first glance the meteor trail appeared like it might be a long, skinny, sinusoidal tube. When the image was imported into Paint Shop Pro and stretched across its width, it was found that the impression of the long period sinuousness occurred became the object undulated slightly during its flight.
On the short term, the width of the trail seemed to remain fairly constant between its valleys and peaks. Those valleys and peaks are shape points, not rounded as I would expect if the object were rotating and caused the corkscrew effect -- but that may be because of the extreme stretch by a factor of 10 I applied to the width. The periods between peaks appeared somewhat erratic over the first half of the trail, then settled into a uniform period.
Ramblings: If this is an image taken through an 8 inch telescope, then it should be safe to assume the object was dim and its flight was over a very short apparent distance (conventional telescopes' fields of view are small). The original meteoroid was very small, smaller than the "grains of sand" or flicks of "cigarette ash" that cause the meteors we see with our naked eyes.
What was its nature? I haven't a clue. It would be interesting to know why it undulated in flight, and why it rotated or "viberated" so rapidly -- at least 25 times in a period of time shorter than one second.
Will they name it Kerry's Meteor?
a blast from the past, possible space list ping?
