{"id":1303464,"date":"2019-02-09T12:36:31","date_gmt":"2019-02-09T19:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vaildaily.com\/?p=446850"},"modified":"2019-02-09T12:36:31","modified_gmt":"2019-02-09T19:36:31","slug":"meteor-sighting-a-bird-a-plane-no-its-a-fireball-in-the-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/meteor-sighting-a-bird-a-plane-no-its-a-fireball-in-the-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"Meteor sighting: A bird, a plane \u2014 no, it\u2019s a fireball in the sky"},"content":{"rendered":"

People with their eyes to the sky around 6 p.m. Thursday were in for a cosmic treat.<\/p>\n

A bright orb, glowing with the intensity of a full moon, shot across the cloudless expanse of stars, leaving a smoky trail in its path.<\/p>\n

Chris Powers was driving to his home near Stagecoach when he spotted what astronomers call a fireball sailing over the Flat Tops Wilderness Area.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like it,\u201d he said in a message. \u201cI was mesmerized for the rest of the night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Officials from the American Meteor Society, a nonprofit group that tracks solar objects, had\u00a0received 60 reports about the fireball by Friday<\/a>. Most sightings came from the Front Range, but people from Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming also reported sightings.<\/p>\n

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Using the location and times of those reports, officials were able to calculate a three-dimensional trajectory of the celestial projectile.<\/p>\n

According to that data, the fireball traveled east to west above Montrose and ended its flight southwest of that city.<\/p>\n

Not to be confused with a college kid\u2019s go-to liquor, a fireball is simply a very bright meteor. Most fireballs have about the same luminosity as the planet Venus, according to the American Meteor Society\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

Powers said the fireball he saw looked like a shooting star but much brighter. It reminded him of the tail of a firework.<\/p>\n

Paul McCudden, astronomy professor at Colorado Mountain College Steamboat Springs, did not get to see last night\u2019s fireball. But, in his years studying and observing the stars, he has seen his fair share.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not too rare, actually,\u201d he said of such sightings.<\/p>\n

The American Meteor Society has calculated that several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude fall into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere each day.<\/p>\n

Getting the chance to see that debris can prove difficult.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of those meteors, about two-thirds, fall over the open ocean. Another quarter plummet across uninhabited areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose that occur at night also stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them,\u201d the society explains on its website.<\/p>\n

Still others fall during the day, when the sky is too bright to spot many objects in space except for the sun, moon and a few stars.<\/p>\n

Astronomers use an ancient Greek measuring system, more than 2,000 years old, to determine the brightness of celestial objects, like fireballs, according to McCudden.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe larger the number, the dimmer the star,\u201d McCudden said.<\/p>\n

The system is based on the star Vega, whose brightness was historically denoted with a brightness magnitude of 0. Astronomers now put it at around 0.14.<\/p>\n

One of the brightest objects in the solar system, the sun, has a magnitude of -26.7 on this scale. The dimmest objects that people can see with the naked eye measure in at 5 or 6.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnything above that, you need a telescope to see,\u201d McCudden said.<\/p>\n

Fireballs typically have a magnitude of -4, but McCudden estimates Thursday\u2019s event was much brighter. Based on images, he compared its magnitude to a full moon, which has a brightness of -12.6.<\/p>\n

He said that objects that bright could send meteorites, shrapnel from a meteor, crashing to the Earth\u2019s surface. He had a message for anyone near Montrose who may find a fragment:<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t turn it into jewelry,\u201d he said. \u201cTurn it into a scientist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meteorites, some of the original pieces of the solar system, offer astronomers like McCudden a historical look at the universe and information about how it formed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe call them fossils of the solar system,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you find a meteorite, you\u2019re holding something that\u2019s probably 4.5 billion years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s something to get fired up about.<\/p>\n

To reach Derek Maiolo, call 970-871-4247, email\u00a0dmaiolo@SteamboatPilot.com<\/a>\u00a0or follow him on Twitter\u00a0@derek_maiolo.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

via:: Vail Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People with their eyes to the sky around 6 p.m. Thursday were in for a cosmic treat. A bright orb, glowing with the intensity of a full moon, shot across the cloudless expanse of stars, leaving a smoky trail in its path. Chris Powers was driving to his home near Stagecoach when he spotted what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1303464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-14 02:13:39","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1303464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1303464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1303464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1303464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}