[meteorite-list] Meteor Explodes Above Colorado

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon May 24 14:21:33 2004
Message-ID: <200405241821.LAA18060_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.montrosepress.com/articles/2004/05/23/local_news/2.txt

Meteor explodes above Montrose
Mike Robuck
Montrose Daily Press (Colorado)
May 23, 2004

MONTROSE - When a meteor exploded Friday at 2:44 a.m. over Montrose it was
serendipity defined for Montrose High School teacher Mike Nadiak and the
All-Sky club he oversees.

Nadiak is an earth and space science teacher at the high school, and
Friday afternoon was the last scheduled meeting for the eight to 10
students who were taking part in the statewide All-Sky network, a project
sponsored by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science that has digital
cameras set up on the rooftops of various schools around the state.

Instead of just the end-of-the-year ice cream social that Nadiak had
planned, the All-Sky club was also able to look at images from the MHS
camera of a meteor that streaked across the sky from the San Juan
Mountains before exploding between Montrose and Colona Friday morning.

"Coincidently, this was the last day the club was meeting this year,"
Nadiak said, as an image of the meteor was projected on a large screen in
his classroom. "They're still analyzing the information, but the debris is
probably spread over Montrose. When they refine the data, we will have a
better idea of how big it was and where the debris might be."

The All-Sky club is part of the school's Geoscience club. Each morning,
the students check whether the camera picked anything up the night before.
Some nights it's just planes circling the airport, but last night the
camera recorded the meteor.

"It's a great privilege to be a part of this (All-Sky program)," said
senior Kiel Brennan, who is president of the All-Sky club. "I will go look
for pieces of it once they get a better idea of where they might be."

While the students ate their ice cream, Nadiak briefed them on the latest
information about the meteor from a Web site.

"We were eating lunch outside when Mr. Nadiak came out and said to come in
if we wanted to see something really cool," said Christine Kessler, a
junior and past president of the All-Sky club. "I'm the type of person who
will sit on a sleeping bag until 3 a.m. hoping to see a meteor, so this
was pretty exciting."

It was the second time in two years that the All-Sky camera at MHS caught
a meteor blazing across the sky. The last large meteor in the area was
Nov. 28, 2002, on Thanksgiving around sunset, but Friday's meteor was even
brighter than the first one.

Physicist Chris L. Peterson, a member of the Denver Museum of Nature &
Science's meteorite investigation team, saw images of the meteor from
several cameras, including one from his Cloudbait Observatory in Guffey,
Colo.

"This one is much brighter than the one from Thanksgiving," Peterson said.
"Unlike the one that dropped around the Black Canyon, this one probably
fell on yards and streets in Montrose. It was just a huge explosion
overhead since it was coming straight over Montrose."

Peterson said he couldn't say for sure what size the meteor was yet, but
he guessed it was larger than the Thanksgiving meteor, which was the size
of a filing cabinet. He said residents should be on the lookout for black,
shiny rocks with a smooth, uniform texture on the outside. The most common
type of meteor rock looks like concrete on the inside if it broke on
impact.

The All-Sky network has 10 cameras mounted on the rooftops of schools
around the state and one on top of the Denver Museum.

To capture the images, the camera looks down into a convex mirror, which
looks up into the sky and shows a field of view almost down to the
horizon. The camera is connected to a computer, which runs a meteor
detection program. Because the camera is always on, any moving
light-emitting object in the sky is recorded as a digital image on the
computer.

A computer program identifies movement in the sky and records only the
sections where something has occurred. Students then watch the saved clips
to sort out airplanes and other nonmeteorites before sending them to a
database at the museum to be studied.

For more information on the meteor, or to provide information if you saw
it, go to Peterson's Web site at www.cloudbait.com.
Received on Mon 24 May 2004 02:21:21 PM PDT