I caught this Perseid Meteor Fireball at 12:17AM on Sunday, July 26, 2009. It fell to my NNE.



I received this email from someone who saw my picture on Spaceweather.com:

Greetings Brian,
I live in Springfield MO and am sure my wife, a friend and I witnessed the fireball you photographed last night. One of my wife's favorite sites is Spaceweather.com and she was delighted to find your picture there. I took the liberty of submitting a link to your site to our local KY3 news along with a description of what we saw. We were lounging in our back yard enjoying the scent of our night-blooming jasmine when that fireball soared over our heads. The duration was about 4 or 5 seconds, it traveled from due north to south covering at least half of the visible sky and broke up, fanning out slightly in it's final second. So we're not sure it couldn't be classified as a bolide! We checked the time after recovering our wits and it must have been around 12:15 a.m. when it occurred. Just wanted to share the experience and say thanks for catching it with your camera!

Springfield, MO is about 100 miles NNE from my location north of Ozark, Arkansas (In Northwest Arkansas).

Did anyone further up in NW AR happen to see this or hear from anyone else about it?

~Brian

It turns out that that fireball was visible over quite a area.. from Illinois through Missouri (where sounds were observed)l, across Northern Arkansas and into Eastern Kansas. Its quite apparent from the various descriptions that I only caught a portion of that meteor. I caught another spectacular meteor this morning at 3:25am. I am pretty sure its a Delta Aquariid. The trail was quite visible for 4 minutes and barely visible for 14 minutes total.

This is uncropped!

Brian. You could go a lifetime and not catch a meteor like this one on the chip.
Mike H.

I am pretty sure its a Delta Aquariid. The trail was quite visible for 4 minutes and barely visible for 14 minutes total.

Two beautiful meteors, Brian! I haven't been into the forum for several days so I just now saw these. The possible Perseid is clearly illuminating more upper-level materials from earlier meteor activity. It can only be upper-level materials because it's only illuminated by the brighter portions of the fireball. Clouds at a lower level would have been illuminated over a much broader area, I believe.

The other meteor is probably an Aquariid as you suspect. If you trace the direction of the trail back to the SE in Stellarium, you run into Aquarius' water vessel on the other side of Pisces.

Fantastic images.....CONGRATS!

---

Bob Moody

No pictures, but I did see two nice bright meteors passing through Cassiopea last night about 11:30 pm.

Those photos are real nice and , like good lightning pictures, HARD to take..............Those are as good as I've seen on other websites.

Brian, if I had taken those shots, I would submit them to Astronomy or Sky & Telescope for publication.

---

nSpace01

thanks, yeah I am now as obsessed with getting meteors as lightning. I got about 50 meteor pics total and 30 of them are here:

http://www.realclearwx.com/july09.htm

Here are my best from the 12/13th:

Brian. I said you had a once in a lifetime image. I was wrong. Your Spaceweather image shows you dedication and outstanding results. Please keep us posted.
Mike H.

Thanks Mike! I have gotten 1-2 meteors every night the past few days. I took a break for a few days after the Perseids but got bored this weekend and got that meteor that is on spaceweather and so I have had my camera up every night since. Nothing great though a couple were decent. Most of its luck... though it certainly helps that I am in such a dark sky location (class 2 on that bortle scale - though just barely) that I can shoot off my porch. I am trying to talk my wife into letting me get a allsky camera setup...