We have seen many things over the years on Shetland Webcams….most of it can be explained…and to be absolutely honest I have a pile of stuff as yet unseen that defies (so far) explanation.
On Saturday 13th April around 08:24 (07:24GMT) apparently homes were shaken from Thurso in the north of Scotland to the northerly islands of Shetland as something entered the atmosphere with a “bang”.
Fireballs are not unique and often missed but when seen with the naked eye are awesome visual experiences. I personally have seen one with the naked eye and I have also seen 3 similar events on our live streams from Shetland.
Very impressive.
Over the last few years we have upgraded our core camera network and almost all of them are capable of good performance in low light conditions…in practice this means we can see the auroral events, stars, shooting stars and satellites - many of them helping rural Shetlanders stay online (thanks Elon). And yes…we can even see the Milky Way from the really dark locations and that, to me at least, is even more impressive.
All that said, earlier today and in broad daylight with a blue sky backdrop many of our cameras witnessed a unique daytime fireball event. It even caught the attention of the media on what must surely have been a quiet news day.
I have included the original video clips from all the cameras that witnessed the burn-up of some microscopic piece of dust, space junk (plenty of that about) or perhaps a larger than expected early Lyrid meteor that experts have claimed.
All but the Eshaness HD clip are the same duration but Eshaness HD is longer as it was just such a nice relaxing clip that had sound and that happened to include the fireball. This clip is to show that despite the reports of bangs…we did not hear anything even accounting for the basics…sound lags video. I have annotated all clips so you can just skip to the good bits :)
Actually at the end of the day it was quite a nice thing to witness online and as it gets lost in the future news events I wanted to make sure it was captured here.
I did smile as the person viewed their smartphone in Lerwick town centre as the object made its final farewell …
I saw none of these clips personally in real-time and therefore I am grateful to this fantastic community that did all the hard work for me…spending hours on Eshaness HD, for example, which had no timecode visible. Some detective work went on analysing cloud formations to work out the real time :)
Awesome!
