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  Fireball! Fireball!Jun 08, 2011 3:23 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:On May 20th, NASA cameras captured images of a "man-sized fireball meteor over Macon, GA":
 
video on Youtube
 
Kind of neat how you can see it come in and then break up. What really surprised me about this was that NASA even *has* cameras set up to capture such events: turns out that's their All-Sky Fireball Network, which sounds grand but currently consists of four black and white networked cameras pointed upward in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. They're meant to record "fireball" meteors, which means any meteor brighter than Venus in the night sky (huh!). This particular fireball meteor was the brightest they've seen in their three years of observation; when it entered the atmosphere, it was moving at about 24 miles per second (86,000 miles per hour), and 'at this velocity, the boulder-sized "dirty snowball" possessed an energy or striking power somewhere between 500-1000 tons of TNT' (that would be 1/40th to 1/20th the power of the Fat Man nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki)--but it broke up in the atmosphere, and didn't do any damage.
 
 
 
 
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