[meteorite-list] Dumb Questions About Meteors & Meteorites

[Chris Peterson]

You're just seeing incandescence from the last bit of meteoroid that hasn't
survived the previous (four?) fragmentation events as well as the continuous
ablation. I don't see any evidence in this photo of a smoke train at all. If
one was produced, it would only be visible after the meteor faded away, and
if the exposure continued on for at least a few seconds so the trail could
start to disperse.

Chris

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Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Meteorites USA" <eric at meteoritesusa.com>
Cc: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 8:58 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Dumb Questions About Meteors & Meteorites


> Hi Robert, Sterling, Erik, Greg, Darren, ALL, Thanks for all the 
> answers...
>
> I wanted to include a photo in my question. We're all familiar with Mike 
> Hankey's now world famous PA fireball photo which just happened to catch 
> the fragmentation of a large meteoroid as it was breaking up. This left 
> many smoke trains in the air from each fragment.Now, even though no 
> meteorites have yet to be recovered from this, there is a possibility 
> there will be. But it brings up a question. This was an abnormal fireball 
> and rather large but I've included another photo of a smaller Leonid 
> meteor, with what appears to be a small smoke train emerging from the 
> incandescence and entering dark flight.
>
> Take a look at this Leonid photo. As you can see after the incandescence 
> there's a small smoke train shooting out from the tip of the meteor. Is 
> that in fact the smoke train from the particle/meteoroid just before 
> entering dark flight? Or was this just the last bit of the meteoroid 
> burning up?
>
> Leonid: http://www.meteoritesusa.com/images/Leonid_Meteor-wikipedia-cc.jpg
> Leonid Closeup: 
> http://www.meteoritesusa.com/images/Leonid_Meteor-wikipedia-cc-2.jpg
>
> Regards,
> Eric