On Wednesday evening around 21:15 UT there was a bright fireball observed from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, England, France, Switzerland, and as far as Wales! The IMO has already already received more than 80 reports and this very bright fireball was caught with different cameras.

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The French meteor network FRIPON caught the fireball with several cameras located in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany.

FRIPON Image of Belgian Fireball from Lille

FRIPON Image of Belgian Fireball from Lille

The CAMS BeNeLux meteor network caught the fireball on four cameras. Using the data from the three cameras located in Oostkapelle, Graphfontaine, and Gronau, the radiant position could be computed by Carl Johannink to be at the border between the constellations Lynx and Gemini. Furthermore, he could derive that the fireball started southwest of Utrecht, the Netherlands, at ~138 km height and ended in northern France, ~80 km southeast of Lille (~87 km height). The meteoroid has a high geocentric velocity of a bit more than 65 km/s.

An additional preliminary trajectory based on a fast measurement of two photographic stations (Oostkapelle and Kerkrade, The Netherlands) were calculated by Marco Langbroeck. It seems to have been a very long trajectory of about 200 km with a very shallow entry angle of 12 degrees.
He supports Carl Johannink’s findings and determines a starting point on the border between the Netherlands and Belgium (about 51.42 N, 4.62 E) and an end point over northern France (about 49.93 N, 3.23 E). The end height of ~84 km means that a meteorite recovery is not probable.

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Fireball detection with CAMS 318 (about 52.21 N, 7.02 E), the image center is at Az = 345, and h = 34° and the FOV 30° x 20°, Image Credit: Carl Johannink

Klaas Jobse caught the fireball on an all-sky camera at Oostkapelle, the Netherlands, the persistent train could be followed for 30 minutes on the all-sky camera. Below is a video of the event which was taken on one of his cameras and it shows how fast this fireball was.


Video of the fireball detection with an all-sky camera at Oostkapelle, NL (CAMS), Credit: Klaas Jobse
CAMS detection, Image Credit: Klaas Jobse

CAMS detection, Image Credit: Klaas Jobse

So far, there are more than 80 reports of the fireball which also allowed the computation of a trajectory. It stretches from the Dutch border to the French border crossing all the way over Belgium.

alerts-imo-gimp
IMO Event#4087-2018 – Witness Locations and Estimated ground trajectory
IMO Event#4087-2018 – Event caught on AllSkycam by Robert Hass

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One comment

  • I don’t know if it’s the same meteorit. But on 10th October at about 23:30 oclock a Meteorit burned down like 15 meters above the ground like 50-100 meters from my house away in Germany Hagen.

    It was just mind blowing… and i could not realise it for 1 week, neither I could stop thinking about it…I’m so lucky and it is just terrifying, what power something like that has. And now fast life can be over…

    At like 23:30 o’clock I was looking out of the window right before sleeping and suddenly I saw a Bright white light, after a second it turned red orange burning. And the red line stoped at like 15 meters above the ground. It was like 2 seconds at all.

    When it turned red orange burning and I realized what it was, I was scared to death because I didn’t know what will happen now. Because it looked like it will crash into the house in front of me. But no sound, no explosion nothing.

    The next days I was searching for wholes or something burned or destroyed, but I could not find anything. So I think we all got lucky there, that it burned down the last second before impact.

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