Meteorite 'photographed' hitting Earth

If the odds are only 1,000,000 to 1, we should have a hell of a lot more photographs. Assume one camera and one roll of film per household per year in the Western world. That's roughly 300 million rolls with lets say 20 shots per film. Assume 2/3 are indoors and we still have 2 billion outside photgraphs every year. So we ought to get two thousand meteorite strikes captured on film!
Neat photograph though
 
Yeah,
i ran that story when it first came out…
However, there are some inconstancies with the photo..

The angle of entry seems to be wrong...
The atmosphere would slow the speed to show a curved ballistic approach.
A meteorite travelling at 30 000 mph would have to be large to penetrate the atmosphere. There seems nothing has been found there.

Therefore, the jury is still out on this one.
 
orange said:
The first photograph of a meteor before reaching the ground, with the odds being 1:1'000'000.

Seems too good to be true. A meteor hitting the Earth with a speed of 30'000 km/s must be practically impossible to capture. Cool picture though.

Any thoughts?
Click to expand...
There are numerous cases of meteors being caught on videotape as they fall - does that count as 'photographed'? . There was one case in particular in which a meteor impacted near a soccer field where some children's teams were playing, and since many of the parents had video cameras out to record their children's game there were several people who caught it on film.
 
blobrana said:
A meteorite travelling at 30 000 mph would have to be large to penetrate the atmosphere.
Click to expand...

True, but they become small as they travel through the atmosphere, thus the small meterorite.
 
Hum,

"If something is too large to burn up completely, the heating
only lasts until it’s well below the speed of sound in air, or
until it hits the ground
• An incoming object will be stopped after encountering a
column of air roughly equalling it’s own mass
• For most objects (less than a few metres across) this
happens tens of kilometres above the ground
• After that, the object just falls, like anything else dropped
from that height, at a fixed speed set by its mass and air
resistance (eg, ~200km/h for a falling human)"
Taken from this :
http://www.wa.gov.au/perthobs/OurSolarSystem/PDFs/OU06g.pdf


So if you were in an aeroplane and you chucked out a 3 lb metal ball , i think it would be impossible to get that angle of entry...

A ballistic/steeper path would be seen, i suspect. (an you would land in jail)
 
Hum,
As i said before, the path shows no sign of a ballistic entry; therefore, the velocity/density would have to be extremely high, and would have created a large crater….
The smoke trail is not directly illuminated by sunlight; apart from the high clouds, nothing else is. The Sun was below the horizon at the time…
The smoke trail does not intersect with the flash, but rather a point above it. Therefore, there could not be any physical contact…
Moreover, conclusively, there is no sign of the "smoke trail” in a second image in the third image, taken 15 seconds later…

More at my `news page`... scroll halfway down (`cos it`s old news) and click on `second image`...

http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/blobrana/news/index.html
 
Hum,
i read once that on average a `million to one` event happens to everyone , three times a day...
 
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