From various sources.
From the NWS in Milwaukee, video links and radar images follow.
MANY REPORTS OF A BRIGHT FIREBALL HAVE BEEN FLOODING COUNTY SHERIFF
DISPATCH CENTERS ACROSS THE SOUTHERN HALF OF WISCONSIN THROUGH THE NIGHT.
THE FIREBALL WAS VISIBLE BETWEEN 10 PM AND 1015 PM CDT.
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE OFFICES IN LA CROSSE…DAVENPORT AND DES
MOINES IOWA…AS WELL AS ST LOUIS AND KANSAS CITY MISSOURI HAVE
RECEIVED NUMEROUS REPORTS OF A FIREBALL FROM LAW ENFORCEMENT
OFFICIALS AND THE PUBLIC AROUND THE SAME TIME AS THE REPORTS IN
OUR COUNTY WARNING AREA.
WHILE NO OFFICIAL DETERMINATION HAS BEEN MADE OF WHAT CAUSED THE
FIREBALL…SPACE DEBRIS…METEOR ETC…THERE IS A METEOR SHOWER
CURRENTLY OCCURRING CALLED THE GAMMA VIRGINIDS. IT BEGAN APRIL 4TH
AND IS EXPECTED TO LAST THROUGH APRIL 21ST…WITH THE PEAK
ACTIVITY APRIL 14TH AND 15TH. A LARGE METEORITE COULD HAVE CAUSED
THE BRILLIANT FIREBALL THAT HAS BEEN REPORTED.
WE WILL PASS ALONG ANY FURTHER INFORMATION THAT BECOMES AVAILABLE.
Webcam video from UW-Madison AOS/SSEC: http://www.aos.wisc.edu/fireball/2010_04_14_fireball_loop_1024x768_long.gif
==================================
Fireball Wednesday Night 4/14
Just after 10 pm CDT Wednesday evening April 14th, a fireball or very bright meteor was observed streaking across the sky. The fireball was seen over the northern sky, moving from west to east. Well before it reached the horizon, it broke up into smaller pieces and was lost from sight. The fireball was seen across Northern Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Southern Wisconsin. Several reports of a prolonged sonic boom were received from areas north of Highway 20, along with shaking of homes, trees and various other objects including wind chimes. As of late Wednesday evening, it is unknown whether any portion of this meteorite hit the ground.
The fireball was caught on a webcam from UW-Madison AOS/SSEC.
www.aos.wisc.edu/fireball/2010_04_14_fireball_loop_1024x768_long.gif
The fireball was also caught by a Howard County Iowa Sheriff’s Deputy.
http://addins.kwwl.com/blogs/weather/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/fireball-web.wmv
This video was provided by KWWL TV.
Also, the Doppler Radar from the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities appeared to capture a portion of the smoke trail from the fireball at 0302z (1002 PM CDT), as seen in the image below. It appears as a thin line extending across portions of Grant and Iowa Counties in Wisconsin. This trail is positioned nearly 88 miles north-northeast of Davenport, Iowa at an elevation of just over 24,000 ft AGL.
click to enlarge
Is it possible the ball was some form of lightning? Looking down on the photo which looks like flower, the first thought was it resembled a sunspot.
richard (13:06:10) :
I live in Britain and nothing nearly so exciting ever happens here.
I did see a hedgehog the other day and that’s about as interesting as it gets…
You just HIDE everything exciting, like CRU did. However what about your famous britain ghosts and “ghosts to become” green politicians?
Re: Cyber (09:19:55) :
Coming home at 3:00 am and relieving yourself in the backyard might explain why no one else saw your fireball in the sky. I saw that same fireball once when I peeled backward off a bar stool in a Charleston, SC beer bar. Like your own experience, the other patrons denied seeing the brilliant flash of light that was revealed to me at the exact moment I contacted ground zero.
“”” enneagram (13:25:30) :
George E. Smith (12:25:42) :
but this one is a humdinger; how did that sneak though Leif’s solar wind shield.
Maybe Thor is just bragging he’s bigger than Gaia.
Be careful George! Dr.S is a most respectful inquisition friar, can take you to the stake… “””
Well I used to photograph lightning strikes near St Charles Mo. Every Summer Sunday at 4:30 PM, there was a thunderstorm, and a colleage and I would climb out of the swimming pool, and go set up our cameras in a corn field.
We got some pretty good strike pictures; sitting in our car, and triggering the remote; well until this tornado went through and tore up the whole darn corn field right before our eyes. We hightailed it back to the safety of the swimming pool and threw our underwear in the laundry.
Climat change casues methane to spontaneously combust in the atmosphere: expert.
I was enroute home to Pasco,Wa back in 1978 in a twin Cessna that
I flew for a Air Charter outfit. Over the central Washington Cascades,
the whole world went blue-white! I could see Mt. Shasta from just East of
Rainer, all the way north to Baker. Lit up like day, it lasted for a good
two minutes. ATC lit up with “WHAT WAS THAT!!”….
More Proof of AGW……maybe we should ask Danny Glover……John….
Check out Three Men in Search of Monsters.
Re: Douglas DC (15:25:45) :
“I was enroute home to Pasco,Wa back in 1978 in a twin Cessna that
I flew for a Air Charter outfit… the whole world went blue-white…“WHAT WAS THAT!!”
See my response to “Cyber” (14.23.40). Drinking and flying is an even worse idea than drinking and relieving yourself in the yard.
Douglas DC (15:25:45) :
I was enroute home to Pasco,Wa back in 1978 in a twin Cessna that
I flew for a Air Charter outfit. Over the central Washington Cascades,
the whole world went blue-white! I could see Mt. Shasta from just East of
Rainer, all the way north to Baker. Lit up like day, it lasted for a good
two minutes. ATC lit up with “WHAT WAS THAT!!”….
…Search “Operation Starfish”
“In ancient times, people knew how to properly handle these events – with human sacrifices”
Yes and the human they sacrificed was the king. Perhaps we should reinstate the practice…. Iceland has a nice active volcano available
“The tradition which associated the sacrifice of the king or his children with a great dearth points clearly to the belief, so common among primitive folk, that the king is responsible for the weather and the crops, and that he may justly pay with his life for the inclemency of the one or the failure of the other.”
http://www.bartleby.com/196/65.html
Oh Pachauri where are YOU?
The association of sound reported with such events interests me. Given how high up these events occur you’d expect a 30+ second delay in sound reaching the ground. As the events themselves seldom last that long, you’d expect the sound to arrive significantly after the observed event. Yet that often isn’t what observers report.
These stories are great. I love reading everyone’s experiences over the years.
I wasn’t aware that they were referring to the contrail that was visible for 15 minutes. I assumed that they meant that the fireball was visible for 15 minutes. Wouldn’t a meteor strike just top off the recent trend with the volcano in Iceland.
Where’s chicken little when he’s needed?
I don’t know what that fireball was was but one of my neighbors is starting to look suspiciously like a giant seed pod.
Sometime I look at some of the people in our government, and I begin to wonder if they hatched out of pods.
We’re at peace, always.
Claude Harvey (17:23:56) :
Re: Douglas DC (15:25:45) : “I was enroute home to Pasco,Wa back in 1978 in a twin Cessna that I flew for a Air Charter outfit… the whole world went blue-white…“WHAT WAS THAT!!”
See my response to “Cyber” (14.23.40). Drinking and flying is an even worse idea than drinking and relieving yourself in the yard.
Um, don’t remember where I heard it ( I went to school with a lot of folks who’s family were either nuke lab guys or spooks or both … and we’d sometimes talk… {the school was ‘approved’ for kids of folks who had clearance and might be subject to blackmail / kidnap. Yeah, different world… Strange when you are dating a lab officers daughter and you KNOW “Clarence Clearance” is around somewhere, but just can’t pick him out. Yet when ‘something happens’ there are surprisingly fast and appropriate ‘things that respond’…} and the talk turned to ‘things nuclear’ from time to time.)
One of the things discussed was detecting nuclear bomb tests.
The story goes that the first spy sats to look for them were reporting about 2 false positives / year. Then they (friends Dad…) figured out that about that often a rock from space hit the air with about the power / flash size of a small nuke somewhere on the planet …
Most of these are in the middle of nowhere and never reach the ground, so folks don’t notice. Some are during daylight, others are above thick cloud decks (and would probably look like bright lightning). Others are seen by maybe one fishing boat (if anyone is looking at the sky then…). But the world has a lot of “big empty” in it… so it’s typically many years between ‘widely observed’ events.
The “fix” was to look for a ‘double flash’ signature that nukes make but meteors blowing up at altitude do not make…
I suspect the “size threshold” for detection was probably lower than a 1 KT air burst as they would also want to detect partial burial tests… but the details of threshold were “unavailable” to our discussions. (Though we did discuss the Taylor bomb that was the smallest ever made to go boom…)
So I’d not cast aspersions on a witness who says they saw something “blow up” or give off a very bright flash of light. Rather, I’d be more amazed at how few times It’s observed and reported…
Sometime very roughly around 1965, at dusk, in southeastern Massachusetts, I saw a huge fireball, looked to be about the size of the full moon, with a trail, and with somewhat multi-colored flames on the object itself, look as if they were falling from it, although I don’t mean that I saw them at any significant angle below the object.
I heard the sizzling sound that people have reported hearing from large meteors since the Middle Ages (or something), which authorities used to think was imaginary, but which some Japanese seem now to have shown may result from an electric or electromagnetic effect on foil, or something one is wearing, or something nearby to the person, or his hair.
I stupidly thought it might be a burning airplane, so I got ahold of a buddy and we went driving around the area that night looking for the crash or burning forest or whatever. The next day, the news reported that it was a meteor, had entered the atmosphere over Norway and exploded near Albany, NY, with the explosion witnessed by an airplane pilot there. I have a problem with whether that’s consistent with the direction of travel I observed, but that’s hard to tell with flying objects (at least for a person who doesn’t know anything about judging the matter).
Anyway, it was amazing.
To the person who says nothing exciting like this ever happens in the UK, I say that’s not true, not that I know of anything exciting that has happened there, but that things like this are easy to miss, unless they’re VERY spectacular, so they’d get you out of bed or what have you.
Since everyone else is telling there “sighting” stories, I’ll share mine. It wasn’t a meteor, but probably a much rarer sighting.
One early morning (I think it was 3-4 am) in the late 90s, I was driving home with a friend after a night out on the town in Austin, Texas. Driving south on Interstate 35, I saw a streak across the sky from the western horizon to about the middle of my southern view. It looked sorta like a jet contrail. Except 1) it was 10 times as wide; 2) it was green, and GLOWING, bright enough to be seen well, at night; and 3) the leading end of it was moving 20 times faster than any jet I had ever seen. For a minute, I actually thought it was visitors from another planet. We pulled over and watched it zoom over the eastern horizon, which took just a few seconds. Back on the road, we turned on the radio and a caller was reporting seeing the SPACE SHUTTLE fly over. Apparently, everyone in town knew about it but me.
Anyway, when I dropped my buddy off at his apartment, we turned on the TV, and watched it land live in Florida. About 900 miles away as the crow (or in this case, space shuttle) flies. That was no more than 10 minutes after it passed Austin. 900 miles in 10 minutes. 5,400 miles per hour. And that’s an AVERAGE speed – at the end of that trip, the speed was near zero. So assuming constant deceleration, it had to be over 10,000 mph when it passed Austin.
That was a truly amazing sight. I doubt I’ll ever be fortunate enough to see it again. And the vast majority of people will NEVER see it.
Regards,
Trevor
A timely reminder of where NASA’s R&D dollars should be going, rather than into studying ‘climate change’. Finding and deflecting dangerous near-Earth-objects should be top priority, not somewhere down near the bottom.
/Mr Lynn
I can’t believe you guys are missing something so obvious. It explains this as well as the unprecedented closure of so many airports in Europe.
Three words: Large Hadron Collider
On March 30th, 2010 it began producing subatomic events with “big bang” energies. Who knows what kind of nasties the thing is spewing out. Microscopic black holes or quantum universes with half-lives of hours or days? They assured us nothing like this would happen but it’s evidently happening as we speak. Where’s Al Gore when you really need him?
lol, Large Hadron Collider..
i hope you’re joking. The amount of crackpot theories here makes me laugh. As for the other guy talking about the increase in earthquakes etc, there has been NO increase. Do some research and stop being a reactionary idiot.
bright green, brighter than lightning, falling amid lightning strikes? that’s no meteor, son, that’s a good old-fashioned bolide exactly like Project Sign used to study in New Mexico back in ’47.
Douglas DC: were you in near-earth orbit? you can’t see Shasta from Rainier, silly goose.
Memories….I was driving in downstate Illinois in the early 1980’s, working on one of my industrial anaerobic wastewater sites, and saw a stony meteorite as it exploded.
It made a cool crackling sound and a nice “POP!!” when it exploded, virtually over my head. Very nice! I considered looking for fragments, but figured they would be impossible to find in planted fields. I’m sure it was a typical chondrite meteorite.
This latest bolide should turn up some impact fragments, as fields haven’t been planted yet. The treasure-hunters are out in force, as fragments are worth a bit of cash.
Of course, I blame the warming of the planet, as the atmosphere is expanding from the additional temperature, snaring fragments from the
Edgeworth-Kuiper belt and Oort cloud…
In addition to dying polar bears and parched rain forests, we now have to worry about massive comet hits and asteroid collisions, all because of carbon dioxide….