Hi
Art!
> I was fortunate
enough to be sitting next to a low campfire (facing south) in
Joshua
> Tree National
Park (Jumbo Rocks) on Thanksgiving evening and witnessed
the
> fragmenting
fireball you mentioned.
I'm thrilled to learn that my family and I weren't
the only ones to witness
this bright, fragmenting bolide over
southern California! This very
likely
produced some meteorites, and for once they didn't end
up in the drink.
Between my observation and yours in Joshua Tree, we may
be able
to
triangulate a general location for impact, and perhaps
another
observer will turn up closer to this
location.
I know
exactly where Jumbo Rocks is (I've rock climbed there many
times!) so we'll at least have good coordinates
for our respective viewing
locations. The bolide would have been
lower on the horizon for you since
it was
southeast of my location in Rancho
Bernardo. I first acquired it
at
about 25 degrees above the south-southeast horizon
(roughly azimuth
160)
and it started to fragment 2 to 3 seconds
later. It was visible for at
least
4 seconds, with the fragments fading around 15 degrees
above
~azimuth 130. Magnitude was tough to estimate --
somewhere from
-6 to
-9. Perhaps a little brighter than this before I acquired
it.
My
location was 33.038N, 117.087W, so if extinction occurred at
an
altitude of 20 km, it would have been about 75 km
southeast of Rancho
Bernardo, putting it very close to the Mexican border
-- perhaps near
Canyon
City?
Your
location in Joshua Tree should help a lot as far as
triangulation,
since
you were located northeast of me.
Best,
Rob
