[meteorite-list] Meteor Sighting Thrills Canadian Astronomers

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2005/04/26/meteor-mb050426.html

Meteor sighting thrills Prairie astronomers
CBC News (Canada)
April 26, 2005

WINNIPEG - Stargazing experts have been fielding dozens of calls from
people who spotted a massive meteor in the daytime sky over western
Manitoba on Saturday.

Scott Young of the Manitoba Museum's planetarium says calls are coming
in "fast and furious" from people who saw or heard the meteor, which
passed over Riding Mountain before exploding high over the St. Ambroise
area, north of Portage la Prairie.

"About half the people only heard it because of the sonic boom - the
explosion - and people were thinking maybe it's a plane crash or
something like that. They ran outside and would see this cloud of smoke
that was expanding in the upper atmosphere that was visible for tens of
minutes," said Young.

"The people who saw it described it as a flaming baseball or a Roman
candle with all sorts of flames and trailing smoke arching across the
sky and then detonating in a final explosion. Sounds like a spectacular
sight."

Astronomers say this type of spectacle doesn't happen often.

"We've been trying to find other references to meteors that were bright
enough to be seen in the daytime, and there's a handful throughout all
recorded history in the Prairies at all. There was one in Manitoba maybe
20 years ago," said Young.

"It's a very rare kind of thing. Most of the meteors that we see at
night are just little grains of sand, and a really bright one might be
the size of a marble. But this was probably the size of a suitcase."

Young hopes more people will contact him to say where they were and what
direction they were looking when they saw the space rock hurtling
through the sky, so he can pinpoint the exact details of the meteor's path.

"What we need to do is get a bunch of reports, put them all together and
that will help us narrow down the search area for looking for pieces,"
he said.

"Almost certainly this event would have produced at least one sizeable
chunk of meteorite which would have made it to the ground, and we'd like
to find it."