As usual this is a quiet period for meteors, with no significant visual showers other than the Lyrids in April, which were washed out due to bad weather. Phil Hayward did make some radio detections of the alpha Centaurids, reporting a peak of around 50 per hour at 3am on the 9th of February. Sadly, my own radio detector was “down for maintenance” at this time so I missed it.
There were however a few nice fireballs reported early in the year. On the 14th of February, magnitude -6 fireball was spotted off the north coast of Scotland, a few miles west of Orkney. Another bright fireball was spotted by several observers off the south coast of England on the 26th of February. This one was about magnitude -4.5 and both this and the one on the 14th were picked up on the UK Meteor Network’s video cameras. There were also about 50 reports of an event on the 19th, though this one wasn’t picked up on camera, probably as it was very cloudy that evening.
Moving into March, there were fireballs on the 2nd (magnitude -6.8) and 21st (-5.1). The first of these was at about 2am over central England with its lowest observed point about 30km above Didcot in Oxfordshire. The second was another sea-borne event, about 60 miles off the coast of Norfolk. Images of both these events can also be found in the UKMON archive.
There was one notable fireball during May, when a bright fireball fell over Stoke on Trent at 0300 UT on the 6th of May. Initially it looked pretty promising and the UK Fireball Alliance organized a ground search, in conjunction with the Natural History Museum. A number of volunteers took part in this search.
Unfortunately, as of early June nothing has been found, and a wider appeal has been made to the general public and on social media.