Stunning Images Of A Meteor Over California
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A few nights ago the California sky lit up in a fiery burst as a meteor shot over the Golden State. Some reports say the meteor burned as bright as a full moon, and it reportedly also resulted in a sonic boom, a rare occurrence.
The video below was gleaned from a local newscast, and shows footage of the meteor taken above a high school girl’s soccer game. In reality this video is a collection of photographs take in rapid succession then put together like a fancy pants flip book. For all practical purposes, though, this functions as a film of the event.
io9 also collected some of the better photos of the incident. Take a look…
In this one you see how bright the burning space rock really was. It looks like some stray firework burning across the night sky.
This one looks more than a little bit like a spaceship taking off. The Starship Enterprise springs immediately to mind.
And this is certainly the artsiest of the bunch, mostly due to the black and white composition. You can also see the stars Altair and Vega in the night sky.
Some have reported that this may be a precursor to this year’s Orionid meteor shower, which should reach its peak sometime this weekend. However, Bad Astronomy’s Bill Plait said, “the direction and timing for the meteor are wrong for that… so it’s certainly not an Orionid.” It looks like this may have been a one-time anomaly, rather than part of something larger. I sense a real-life alien invasion story to unfold sometime soon.
