[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wqEHVvdJuU]
Pittsburgh fireball February 17 A fireball meteor at least as bright as the full moon flared over the Pittsburgh region around 4:50 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday morning. The object, detected by three NASA meteor cameras, was moving at a speed of 45,000 miles per hour. Based on its brightness, NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office estimated the object at 2 feet across with a weight of 500 pounds. Something like a very heavy TV falling out of the sky.
"I've seen many meteor showers and this wasn't anything like that. Instead of crossing the upper atmosphere, this feel almost directly down and brighter than any thing I've ever seen of this nature," reported John D. of Elyria, Ohio. "It looked so big that my son and I expected to hear or see an impact."
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"The entire landscape was lit up like daytime. Startling experience. I was very fortunate to be looking out window at the time." So wrote Robert M. of Clarion, Penn. in his report to the American Meteor Society's fireball reporting website .
NASA's cameras first spotted the meteor at an altitude of 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh and last saw it 13 miles above Kittanning, northeast of Pittsburgh. Around 13 miles altitude, the meteoroid entered its "dark flight" phase, when the air slowed it down enough to drop in free fall.
When we see a meteor, we don't actually see the object itself but rather a brilliant "tube" of ionized air caused by the rock's incredibly speedy passage through the atmosphere. Once a meteoroid loses sufficient speed, it no longer has the energy to ionize or make the air glow around it and falls in dark flight.
Some people heard sonic booms during the fall, a good sign that the meteoroid (what you call a meteorite before it hits the ground) fragmented and dropped pieces on the ground east of Kittanning. According to Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Office, seismographs in the region recorded the pressure wave created by the meteoroid's flight.
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Like most meteors and meteorites, this one's a visitor from the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. If pieces did survive the atmosphere's ferocity, may I be the first to welcome them to their new home.
On another note, I wanted to remind moon lovers that a very young, very thin 1-day-old moon will be visible during early twilight in the western sky this evening starting about 25 minutes after sundown.
The moon's about about one fist held at arm's length below the pair of Mars and Venus. Tonight's act is a warm-up for tomorrow night's very close gathering of the moon with the two planets. For more information on that event, click HERE .