Can't believe the NZ Herald. Yesterday afternoon they published this story explaining that the image containing the radar-inteference had nothing to do with the meteor.
But this morning published yet another story including the same radar-inteference image that had even the expert astronomers assuming was due to the meteor and therefore concluding it hit the Pacific Ocean rather than the Tasman...
Re the first video I posted, there's a TVNZ interview with the Tauranga dashcam driver here, in which he says 'the sky lit up out towards Auckland way'. Some other comments I've read say it was a little to the east of Auckland, including one from an astronomy enthusaist in Flatbush who also said it was travelling in a northerly direction. The 'boom' also appears to have been heard more strongly in South Auckland, north Waikato and Thames.
would be good to have a definitive answer on the direction/path
if say it was moving north and so then the sonic boom was heard at a certain point in that path...then that would mean places to the north of that point would hear it just as loud as places as far to the west and east (here and thames)..but that is not the case
so I suggest it was more moving east to west
which puts the object on a similar orbit around the sun to us...but moving faster in the orbit
Knowing the location where the video was taken, Personally I'd put the direction from South West towards North East. I'd also put it travelling over approx. Auckland.
The Northern Advocate quotes a Russell resident saying the 'flash' appeared to come from the east, and a Onerahi resident in Whangarei saying the sonic-boom sounded like 'a large plank of wood being dropped on concrete'.
Not sure if it's accurate, but this Akld track-map based on online eyewitness reports was put together by Aussie based, David Finlay @ Clear Skies TV.
(Self-described as a 'chaser of natural events; eclipses, aurora, meteor showers, comets, storms etc'.)
I guess 20 km up....then 20 km either side , is not going to be much more distance for the sound to travel (triangulation)
so that does make it hard to pin point the exact path
That map shows the meteor going just a couple km to the west of me, but the only sound here was a distant rumbling noise... whereas it was much louder over South Auckland.That could mean it blew up in the skies above South Auckland...
What's that "pre-flash" on the Tauranga Dashcam at about 5 seconds? It seems to flare upwards towards where the object might be, about 1 second before it explodes.
cbm wrote:What's that "pre-flash" on the Tauranga Dashcam at about 5 seconds? It seems to flare upwards towards where the object might be, about 1 second before it explodes.
I think it's just the overhead street-light being refracted by the windscreen 2 seconds after the car passes it, similar to what you see on the other side of the road, but smaller due to the slightly extra distance and curvature of the screen. It also appears to be in front of the clouds, rather than behind them.
Thanks. Viewing it now in 720p that must be it, its colour matches the streetlamps. I would have thought that with this being such a widely viewed event that someone of authority would have published an estimated track by now, but have seen nothing apart from the amateur's one posted to this thread. This video is the best infomation to go on, is it not? If someone recognises exactly where it was filmed could they possiby create a google maps waypoint? Looks like it must be more over Papamoa way, not a part of the Tauranga area I'm so farmillar with. Then can have a go at modeling the len's field of view.
These things are notoriously difficult to track via eyewitness accounts, as essentially everyone who claims to have seen the object will always swear it passed directly over their house.
bpo wrote:These things are notoriously difficult to track via eyewitness accounts, as essentially everyone who claims to have seen the object will always swear it passed directly over their house.
That's not what the majority of the hundreds of reports I've read say.
