Photo of Fiery Object Mystifies Scientists A digital picture of a spectacular and apparently explosive event in the sky fooled a pair of seasoned NASA scientists, has other researchers around the globe mystified, and made a minor celebrity of a teenage photographer. Jonathan Burnett, 15, was photographing his friends skateboarding in Pencoed, Wales when one of them noticed a colorful fireball in the sky. Burnett snapped a picture, then sent it to NASA scientists and asked if they knew what it was. Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell, who run NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), posted the photograph on Oct. 1 and wrote that "a sofa-sized rock came hurtling into the nearby atmosphere of planet Earth and disintegrated." They called the picture "one of the more spectacular meteor images yet recorded." Problem is, it turns out, there was no meteor. Click for more...
(Insert terrible, terrible, rude and stupid joke here): I thought Chi.... I once saw a shooting star that looked just like that. Turns out it was at night.
Thanks for the post, Rockhead. Fascinating stuff. I'm still amazed how little we actually know about even our closest cosmic neighbors. I mean, you'd think we'd have a clue when giant fireballs suddenly blaze the sky. But then again, we're still in relative infancy when it comes to astronomy, cosmology and tracking space objects.
As I started reading this all I could think of was the movie Joe Dirt. His meteor turned out to be a fake too. frozen poo it is a crazy picture, and the fact that there is verification from another source just nuts. I mean it looks like its out of a bad movie. and it looks like its above the clouds. crazy I live APOTD
