Leicester Planetary Scientist Oliver King describes how a lockdown project to capture star trails provided a stunning image of the February 28th fireball over the UK.
On the evening of the 28th February, a meteor dramatically burnt up over the UK, appearing as a bright fireball moving across the sky. This fireball was far brighter than a normal meteor with the UK Meteor Network receiving nearly 800 witness reports from locations all over England and Wales. The morning after, I woke up to a Twitter feed filled with videos and reports about the fireball, but it turns out, I’d managed to capture a photo of it too…
As a lockdown project, I’ve had a Raspberry Pi (a tiny £10 computer) stuck to my window automatically taking star trails photos every night. The star trails photos take 4.5 hours to capture and stars appear as streaks across the sky as the earth rotates beneath them. Anything else relatively bright also ends up in the photo (meaning you get the odd airplane trail and lots of clouds), so when the fireball shot across the sky it ended up as a bright flash cutting across the star trails in the top of the photo.
It looks like the fireball entered the photo when it was around its peak brightness, and gradually faded in brightness as it moved down into the image. The fireball, moving at about 30,000mph, would have only been visible for a few seconds, but burnt so brightly that it was easily the brightest object in the sky the entire night.
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