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While looking at the thousands of images I shot for the Milky Way time lapse I came across one with a fairly bright green meteor. One thing very cool is that I can see that it has a waviness to it instead of the normal straight line. Apparently the tiny pebble was oddly shaped causing it to spiral and vaporize as it hit the upper atmosphere at an extreme speed.
I have searched for other images of spiraling meteors but have not been able to find one. Apparently these are very rare. I found several sources of visual reports, but no photos. The earliest report was from a 1949 article in Popular Astronomy Journal.
Surely this can't be the only image of a spiraling meteor!
My first reaction was that it was a lightning bug. The color matches lightning bugs that I have captured in the past accidently. Now I'm not so sure. Dan Bush Albany, MO
ReplyDeleteYou may be right Dan. Most lightning bugs are pretty faint and this one could have been pretty close to the lens.
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