My meteor tracking system recorded a small fireball about 90 km north of here. Fortunately it was very quiet that night and the RBOOM system picked up a sound which could only be the noise made by the meteor.
The video is slower than real time. The flare that caused the sound is probably just off the bottom of the frame. It got down to something like 40 km altitude before disappearing.
This was a small meteor and probably not a very loud sound so it did not exactly wake people up. But RB recorded it.
If you open the kml file you will see a small straight white line which is the path in 3D space that the meteor traversed while “glowing”. meteor15.kml (862 Bytes)
I should clarify that the arrival time of the infrasound wave corresponded very closely with the expected arrival time given the triangulated position of the meteor when it flared. There were no other sounds detected for several minutes either side of the detected wave.
It is the second meteor recorded by one of our infrasound instruments in a short timeframe. Maybe we will get more when the Geminids and the Quadrantids will come this Winter!
Looks like I caught another one. Very short sharp sound reported by many who live in that area (I am ~100 km away - red arrow). AMS says probably a daytime bolide. Registered on RS too thanks to surface shake.
Nice one! The waveform for the second one is a good example of a near field boom profile: Steep positive spike, following negative part of the wave is lower amplitude but longer duration so about the same area as the leading positive wave. As it attenuates with distance, eventually the wave shape will become a single cycle sine wave (far field boom signature).
