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Brilliant Bolide over Phoenix

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#2
Magical Realist Offline
And I say bollocks to your bolide! Good day to you sir!
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#3
Syne Offline
I think my brother saw one of those in Florida years ago. He swore it was a UFO.
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#4
Yazata Online
I remember seeing something like this over Northern California in the late 1970's. Larger, longer lasting, but not as bright. It looked like a huge fireball, that seemed to break up into smaller pieces. It might have been a large meteor burning up, or a large defunct satellite reentering the atmosphere.

The most impressive recent bolide was the one over Chelyabinsk Russia. Here's a very clear Russian dash-cam video that shows it in all its glory:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c....480p.webm

Besides being as bright as the Sun, this one created a shockwave that blew out windows all over the city, causing many minor injuries. It even collapsed the roof of one factory. It's easy to see why many locals feared Russia was under nuclear attack. A bespectacled science-geek in a military-style uniform from the Emergency Situations Ministry (the paramilitary Russian version of FEMA) came on TV and reassured everyone it was a large bolide.

There's speculation that the huge Tunguska blast in central Siberia was an even larger example of this, one that released nuclear weapon style energies that blew down entire forests.
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#5
Yazata Online
Everything you ever wanted to know about the 2013 Chelyabinsk bolide. It was a large meteor/small asteroid about 60 feet across and traveling at an estimated 40,000 mph. It released maybe 500 kilotons of energy (equivalent to a significant nuclear weapon, 25-33X the size of the Hiroshima bomb), albeit at very high altitude. More than a thousand people were injured badly enough to require medical attention and some 7,000 buildings were damaged (mostly broken windows from the shockwave). The light it gave off was brighter (but whiter) than the Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

The video below includes a whole bunch of extraordinary video footage put together by Russia Today, one after another, showing this thing from all angles from all over this Soviet-style heavy industrial city. The thing's trajectory in from space, the blinding nuclear style flash, windows getting blown in, people's responses inside stores and offices, pretty dramatic.

This is the best documented event of its kind, ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpmXyJrs7iU

From how it looked, I probably would have believed it was a nuclear attack too, just like they did.
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#6
RainbowUnicorn Offline
saw & heard one once.
was quite amazing. late afternoon almost completely clear blue sky.
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#8
Yazata Online
A smaller one right after sunset over the San Francisco bay area where I live. I was out on the road but didn't see it. (I was headed south, and it was apparently to the north, behind me.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...1Oe-XQ44Fw

https://abc7news.com/science/mysterious-...a/4932239/

There was a ULA rocket carrying a photo-recon spy satellite scheduled to launch from Vandenberg this evening, but last word is that the launch was scrubbed and postponed due to excessive wind. So this isn't that. SpaceX isn't up to any of its antics either.

There is also a Russian Soyuz capsule with three astronauts that just departed the Space Station today on its way back, hopefully this wasn't them burning up.

NORAD says they are investigating. Local scientists with cameras shoved in their faces say it was probably a meteor.

By all accounts this was centered north of the bay area but visible all over the region as far south as the Santa Barbara area. Photos are coming in from all over Northern and Central California as well as Reno NV.
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#10
C C Offline
They're saying now that it was circa 25 centimeters (10 inches) and weighed 27 kilograms (60 pounds). Speculation that it was a piece from a Jupiter family comet.
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