The reports are in and the verdict is ... the Geminids were a blast after all. The shower peaked on Dec. 14th and 15th with as many as 140 meteors per hour. Many were fireballs. This Geminid near Warsaw, Poland, lit up the night like a full Moon:
"The meteoroid fragmented into 4 pieces and observers heard a sonic boom similar to distant thunder," says Jarosław Dygos of the Polish Fireball Network whose TV camera recorded the explosion. "Look at the halo around the fireball," he points out. That was caused by meteor-light passing through ice crystals in the clouds--"beautiful!"
Just as the shower was dying down on Dec. 16th, a strange sound echoed from the loudspeaker of Thomas Ashcraft's radio telescope in New Mexico. "A bright fireball was flying overhead," he says. The sound was a distant TV transmitter reflected from the fireball's ionized trail. He combined footage of the fireball with a recording of the echo to produce this movie. Don't forget to turn up the volume.
Click to view the complete 2.8 MB movie
来源:http://www.spaceweather.com/ |
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置顶卡
变色卡
千斤顶
显身卡
