Did I see the Chelyabinsk meteor?

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last posted Feb. 28, 2013, 5:58 p.m.
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Last night Toby and I went to Home Depot to pick up some more greenhouse/aquaponics parts. It took a while to find what we needed and as we started checking out they were already announcing ten minutes to closing, i.e. 9pm PST. Loaded the car, strapped him in, started driving home.

Driving up Bombing Range Road, I saw a falling star ahead on the right side of my windshield. It was bright enough and slow enough to notice while driving, and seemed to have a greenish color.

Neat sight, and was sorry Toby missed it from his seat in the back.

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In the morning, catching up with Twitter, I saw all sorts of tweets about a meteor that struck near Chelyabinsk, Russia damaging windows and even some structures.

Of course, this made my falling star a bit more interesting. Improbable of course but, perhaps, related?

I began to investigate.

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What time did the asteroid strike? I googled "time in Chelyabinsk" — 14 hours ahead of my time. Most of the reports (all paraphrased from each other) talk of the asteroid at 9:20 am local time.

So 9.25 - 14 = -4.75, add 24 to both sides and that's 19.25 — 7:20pm my time. Well bummer. Maybe I did the math wrong? What were both the times in GMT?

That got more interesting. News reports were giving, parenthetically, two different GMT times for 9:20am local:

  • chelyabinsk 0520 GMT — about 59,900 results
  • chelyabinsk 0320 GMT — about 95,700 results

9pm PST is 0500 GMT, so if the 0520 is right we could have something.

Moscow time is 2 hours behind Chelyabinsk's time zone. So if the news happened at 0520 GMT the time at, say, a news agency in Moscow would have been 9:20am!

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So maybe what I saw was at about the right time. What about the location?

The big falling star I saw was (approximately) north of me, falling (approximately) to the north.

pull up the map

Hmm, yeah so of course Russia's on the other side of the world…

North.

Well, I suppose it could have gone over the pole!

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Here's an encouraging post — it claims the 0520 GMT time and has a video of the meteor crossing the sky.

The vehicle seems to be driving into the sunrise, east, and the meteor crosses diagonally from left to right, toward the camera. If that's right, it'd mean the asteroid was heading sort of from the NE going towards the SW over the oblast!

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Via @badastronomer via @vrubaI came across a great map of the asteroid contrail (train) caught on weather satellite:

http://attivissimo.blogspot.ch/2013/02/russian-meteor-path-plotted-in-google.html

It shows that yes, the asteroid was heading SW, but to my (extremely naïve) eye it seems a bit too low an inclination to have come over the pole from my western hemisphere — certainly not straight over, but (if the 0520 GMT time is actually correct) maybe there's still a chance?

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So I roughly overlaid that weather satellite image in Google Earth.

White line extends train path, green line is simply between West Richland and Chelyabinsk:

Chelyabinsk Meteor.kmz

I can't tell my ephemerides from my apocentres and so maybe there's some orbital trickery that makes this possible. But right now we have a strike and a half against this being the same meteor:

  1. The shortest path between my neck of the woods and Chelyabinsk is nearly orthogonal to the path of the meteor train.
  2. (My meteor may, or may not, have been two hours after the Russian one.)
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NASA reports the time as 3:20:26 UTC on Februrary 15, found via the event article on Wikipedia.

So my meteor was not only seemingly at the wrong place, but also almost definitely at the wrong time: nearly two hours later.

Status: BUSTED