You're just seeing incandescence from the last bit of meteoroid that hasn't
survived the previous (four?) fragmentation events as well as the continuous
ablation. I don't see any evidence in this photo of a smoke train at all. If
one was produced, it would only be visible after the meteor faded away, and
if the exposure continued on for at least a few seconds so the trail could
start to disperse.
Chris
*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Meteorites USA" <e...@meteoritesusa.com>
Cc: <meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 8:58 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Dumb Questions About Meteors & Meteorites
Hi Robert, Sterling, Erik, Greg, Darren, ALL, Thanks for all the
answers...
I wanted to include a photo in my question. We're all familiar with Mike
Hankey's now world famous PA fireball photo which just happened to catch
the fragmentation of a large meteoroid as it was breaking up. This left
many smoke trains in the air from each fragment.Now, even though no
meteorites have yet to be recovered from this, there is a possibility
there will be. But it brings up a question. This was an abnormal fireball
and rather large but I've included another photo of a smaller Leonid
meteor, with what appears to be a small smoke train emerging from the
incandescence and entering dark flight.
Take a look at this Leonid photo. As you can see after the incandescence
there's a small smoke train shooting out from the tip of the meteor. Is
that in fact the smoke train from the particle/meteoroid just before
entering dark flight? Or was this just the last bit of the meteoroid
burning up?
Leonid: http://www.meteoritesusa.com/images/Leonid_Meteor-wikipedia-cc.jpg
Leonid Closeup:
http://www.meteoritesusa.com/images/Leonid_Meteor-wikipedia-cc-2.jpg
Regards,
Eric
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