Major Fireball Event Over Colorado :   October 29, 2008    0128 Universal Time
( This is Tuesday evening October 28, 2008,  exactly 7:28:50 PM MDT )

Preliminary Report

I was fortunate to eye-witness this particular fireball event which happened over central Colorado. This is over 300 miles north of my location
in north central New Mexico! I was inside the house and saw it through a window.  The fireball was turquoise to brilliant green
with a long trail and it shed sparks.   It lasted over 8 seconds visually and traveled from East to West with a possible
slight northwesterly heading.  More information from Colorado should be forthcoming soon.

Please send any eyewitness accounts to me. Thanks!    :  Thomas Ashcraft   Mail
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In the movie below the fireball is rather unimpressive at the very top of the screen. But know that it is at the farthest edge of my visual range.
My dual radio forward scatter array caught the sonic event on both channels and if you look at the movie closely you can see the
fireball flare and hear the radio reflection flare simultaneously. It made a "whooping" sound at one point on one channel.
Turn up the sound and listen closely!

Sonic Movie :  Experimental camera supplied by Sandia National Laboratories :
Ashcraft's dual forward scatter system;   video and stereo sound:
FB20081029_0128ut_Ashcraft.mp4   1 minute 15 seconds  3.4 MB
 ( Here is a .mov file of the first 20 seconds of the meteor if you cannot play the .mp4  :    FB20081029fireball_Ashcraft.mov  )



Update :  More video footage now available from Cloudbait Observatory in Colorado:  http://www.cloudbait.com/science/fireball20081028.html


Radio spectrograms of the time of the above meteor.  61.250 MHz reception above white line, 83.250 MHz below white line.
Meteor reflection occurs during the 0128 - 0130 UT minutes in the two spectrograms below.
 



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