Society for Popular Astronomy

[Paul Sutherland]

BBC is reporting that a "meteor shower" was mistaken for distress flares over the English Channel. Not clear to me whether there was actually an outburst of a known shower or actually a fireball.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8102331.stm

Paul
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[JohnM]

Paul,

I am confused by this - of the three Meteor showers one is a Daylight Shower only detectable by Radar and the other two have ZHRs of only 6 or so an hour.

This is either:

An unknown shower that was only visible above the Sea - I have seen no inland reports

The re-entry of space junk but the 'visible for 1/2 hour' does not seem to make this likely

The results of some military exercise but would have to be very large scale to be visible over the whole length of the channel and from both coasts

Anyone got any more information or likely causes ?
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[12dstring]

It sounds to me like the coastguard have just been quick to explain it all away with 3 small meteor showers which happen to cover the time frame.
(..and I assume they meant Ophiuchids rather than Ophruchids)

It'd be very interesting if it did turn out to be a meteor outburst, but something doesn't quite sound right to me

I wonder if Alistair's had any reports.
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Dave

Telescopes: Skywatcher Explorer-150 + Skywatcher ED80
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http://www.12dstring.me.uk/astro.htm

[Deimos]

One non-astronomical aspect to the story is why did people call the Costguard ? I thought the whole world knew that distress is a red flare. I sort of thought everybody knew that. Whilst white means "I am here" and green flare actually means "All Clear Now" (i.e. the opposite of distress) - though I would not expect everybody to know the white and green other than they are NOT distress. Why when people see something they don't understand do they call the emergency services ? No wonder they get overworked and on occasions cannot meet their response times. Most boats will carry Red flares, most should carry white flares and I have never even come across a green flare and never on any boats.

On a more astronomical aspect, I sort of thought there was a supposed occurrence of green flares at sunset. I cannot remember a lot about them but thought that they are rarely observed, a "questionable" phenomenon and a load of explanations that do not really explain anything. I have certainly seen pics of sunsets where, just as the last part of the Sun's disc is on the horizon, it turns green (though as to this being observed by an eye rather than a camera effect I have no idea as I've never seen it other than in photos).

Ian

[Borealis]

[Alastair McBeath]

This seems to be a fairly typical confused media story about meteors. I have very little hard data as yet, and no first-hand sightings, but from previous similar stories, it's possible what happened was a single bright fireball. This was reported to coastguards by various people over a period of about half an hour, and it ended up pluralized into multiple events - so each phone call came to equal one event.

At present, there is nothing to support the idea this was unexpected meteor activity from any shower, nor to say what the actual number of events seen was.

If anybody reading this did spot one or more bright meteors on June 15/16, please send me full details as soon as possible. If any were especially bright - fireball-class meteors are of magnitude -3 and brighter - please see the "Making and Reporting Fireball Observations" page of the SPA website, at:

http://www.popastro.com/sections/meteor/fireball.htm

for details to send and a report form.

Alastair McBeath,
Meteor Director, Society for Popular Astronomy.
E-mail: <meteor@popastro.com> (messages under 150 kB in size only, please)

[Alastair McBeath]

Having had time since my midweek posting for a little further investigation on this June 15/16 event, at present I have one definite fireball sighting from Guernsey then, seen in the western sky around 20:30 UT. There are colloquial, second- or third-hand reports that more than one object was spotted that evening from other places, but confirming these has proven elusive so far. It remains a possibility that more than one event was involved, but as the Guernsey sighting was made less than half an hour after sunset, that event would have to have been impressively brilliant to be seen in the strong twilight at all, which alone may account for the excitement generated.

One of the commonest errors by a non-specialist when asked to comment on a bright meteor, and repeated unquestioningly by the media, is to assume the object must have come from a meteor shower. Such a person then looks at the first meteor shower list that comes to hand - regardless of its accuracy - and picks one or more showers whose maximum falls nearest the date of the event to make the association.

Most fireball-class meteors seen away from the major shower maxima (Quadrantids, Lyrids, Perseids, Orionids, Leonids, Geminids, and occasionally the Taurids during one of their "swarm" returns) will not belong to any shower. Making an association between a fireball and a shower by date alone is unworkable. Other factors need to be examined when genuinely attempting to link any meteor with a given shower, including where the meteor was in the sky, how long its path was compared to the claimed radiant, whether that radiant was even above the horizon at the time, and the object's apparent speed.

Three showers were claimed as possibly connected to this event by the media. Of those, the June Lyrids have not been observed as active for some years. The most recent positive reports of weak rates from them were in 1996, and before that back in the 1970s. The shower may be only occasionally active. The Zeta Perseids are a strong daytime shower, whose radiant lies 15° west of the Sun, thus are unobservable by British evening twilight in mid June. (Shower meteors cannot be seen from a radiant more than about 10° below the horizon, and meteors from such a sub-horizon source are exceptionally rare anyway, usually indicative of unusual activity from that source, most likely a very strong meteor storm.) The Ophiuchids were one of a number of near-ecliptic radiants around Sco-Sgr-Oph-Ser thought active during the UK summer months, but recent video observations have confirmed what some visual observers long suspected, that such sources are not individually identifiable. We now consider such near ecliptic sources to have a single, large, diffuse radiant region centred about 12° east of the point on the ecliptic opposite the Sun, known as the Antihelion Source. More details on all three can be found on the June meteor activity webpage, off the SPA Meteor homepage.

Ian raised some interesting points about the June 15/16 event(s) being mistaken for offshore flares. I suspect very few people will realise that flares are colour-coded as you described, Ian. Most people seeing what they think is a flare over the sea will assume it is someone in distress, regardless of its colour. Although the media mentioned green and white, I've seen other reports which also indicated orange and red were spotted too, off the southwest coasts of England, and if so, I think we should make further allowances because of that.

Aside from the discussions and links here, there are two topics on the UK Weather World's Space Weather Forum which have added some further points (including on the orange and red lights, and the Guernsey fireball sighting). The main one is here:

http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=30836&posts=21&start=1

and has a link from early on page 1 to the other.

Any actual observations of meteors from June 15/16 would still be most welcome!

Alastair McBeath,
Meteor Director, Society for Popular Astronomy.
E-mail: <meteor@popastro.com> (messages under 150 kB in size only, please)

[Andrew Pike]

It might be worth me saying that on the 11th June (also possibly over the weekend 13th/14th enquiries are still underway for reasons that are not astronomical) red fireballs/flares were seen from Lowestoft, Suffolk.

The sighting was not made by an astronomer so apart from the date (11th) and the time, given as 11pm (I assume BST) and it being red, which slowly faded out and disappeared that is as good as it gets for now.

As I say this was not an astronomical report but as it seems to be similar to sightings a few days later along the south coast, just thought I would mention it in passing.