Small meteoroid left a bright trace

Last month, September 21, at 19:00 GMT in the sky over the Netherlands and Belgium was seen flying fireball. As it turned out, it was a meteoroid the size of a few centimeters, which is burned, once in the Earth's atmosphere.

Background: a Meteoroid is a solid celestial body ranging in size from 10 µm to 1 m, which is more cosmic dust, but less of the asteroid.

The fireball was recorded by stations located near the Dutch-Belgian meteor network run by Amateur astronomers from the Dutch meteor society and the Meteor section of the Royal Netherlands Association for meteorology and astronomy. They use automatic cameras with telescopic lenses to photograph the night sky on clear nights.

This gorgeous image was taken by one of the stations in Ermelo (the Netherlands), which is managed by Cohen Mascott. The picture was taken with an exposure of fifteen minutes using the lens fisheye. The camera lens was equipped with a shutter, which during the exposure makes a short "pause" at a rate of 14 per second. Because of these dark periods of the meteor tail looks "dotted". Since the shutter speed is known, we can calculate the number of "dashes" and get to know the flight duration of the fireball: 5.3 seconds.

You can also get information about the deceleration of the meteoroid in the atmosphere. In this case, the object hit the atmosphere at a speed of 31 km/s and slowed down to 23 km/s by the time when it is completely burned at a height of 53 km.

Bright trail just below the top of the fireball — star Arcturus. The big Dipper can be seen right above the tree line. Another bright star in the center of the frame just to the left of the path of the fireball VEGA.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»