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Fireball of 30th March 2013 at 00:39:13 GMT

On Saturday 30th March 2013 at 00:39 GMT a very bright (of the order of magnitude -7), slow moving fireball was observed over much of the North & Midlands of England. This was the first of two detected that day. As ever, the NEMETODE cameras were operating and captured spectacular footage. The object was so bright that it saturated the cameras and additional work was required in order to complete a full analysis such that a reasonable estimate for the trajectory and potential orbit could be determined. There are multiple visual reports on the Armagh Fireball Report Page and on the SPA Fireball Report Page.

The NEMETODE team are indebited to SonotaCo, the developer of the UFO Software Suite, for analysing the data with his (as yet unreleased) FireBall Inspector tool and for providing the Ground Track and Orbit Plot images shown below.

The South East facing camera in Ravensmoor has been rotated clockwise through 90 degrees within its housing in order to minimise local overlap (see Nodes) and so what appears to be the bottom of the field of view is actually the left hand side. In the Ravensmoor video (on the left) you can see the four stars that make up the "keystone" asterism in the constellation Hercules just to the left of the start of the fireball trail. Click on images for videos. A preliminary analysis was published in the April 2013 issue of "The Astronomer" magazine (Vol 49 No 588) and is reproduced with permission here. A more comprehensive analysis appears in WGN, the Journal of the IMO 41:6 (2013, December) and is reproduced here.

 

Clicking on the image of the meteor itself will download / play a .wmv file of the event itself. Details of the date, time and location are shown in the text at the bottom of each video clip. In addition, we've also included images of the derived ground track and orbit.
   
   
   
   
   

All images and videos are available for individual personal use.

The copyright resides with the authors and their written permission must be obtained in advance of any public and / or commercial use.