[meteorite-list] New Mexico Fireball

[Ron Baalke]

Space Weather News for Sept. 14, 2007
http://spaceweather.com

NEW MEXICO FIREBALL: On Sept 13th at approximately 3 o'clock 
in the morning MDT, an extremely bright fireball streaked 
over New Mexico, "It was terrifying," says eyewitness Susan 
K. Burgess. "I was stargazing outside my house near Santa Fe 
when the landscape started becoming very bright, as if a 
brilliant full moon was quickly rising from the southwest. 
The fireball itself [slowly moved] over the house and 
disintegrated with a great deal of scatter in the northwest 
sky."

At the Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, a Sentinel 
all-sky video camera captured the fireball in flight:

Based on data from the video, the visual magnitude of the 
fireball was -14.6, about four times brighter than a full 
Moon!

"The fireball was a pure emerald green, uncomfortably bright 
to look at," adds Harald Edens located in the Magdalena 
Mountains west of Socorro, NM. "The object was 
disintegrating when I saw it, with pieces parallel-tracking 
and trailing the fireball. Those smaller pieces had all 
different colors--most notably red. I think it has been a 
piece of space junk."

Amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft not only 
photographed the fireball, but also recorded echos of a 
distant radio station bouncing off the meteor's ionized trail: 
movie. "This fireball turned night into day!" he says.

Stay tuned for updates.