Huge fireball 17 March 2016 at 3:16

By Richard Kacerek

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Very large fireball reported by public was first noticed by our Church Crookham station at 3:16 this morning. It momentarily overloaded the camera with light and with second video we will be able to triangulate and calculate the orbit soon.

Preliminary calculations estimate the brightens to be around -7 mag and explosion -14 mag. The event lasted just a couple of seconds. Turns out that many UKMON’s cameras captured the event than previously thought, 8 cameras in total.

An estimated terminal altitude is just 30-34km!

Church Crookham camera:

Scotch street camera:

Norman Lockyer camera:

Natural History Museum camera:

Wilcot North camera:

Wilcot North East camera:

Clanfield observatory camera:

Paul Gilbert recorded this video on the car dashcam:

And our thanks to Richard Bassom for sending us his lovely picture.

Chris Cameron-Wilton sent us his video of the event, just south of the village of “Llanarmon-yn-Ial” North of Llangollen in North Wales:

The fireball was also spotted and reported by our neighbors French BOAM network, May-sur-Orne station (S. Jouin) recorded a large flash.

17/03/2016 3:16 TU : #Bolide également enregistré par notre caméra May-sur-Orne #Normandie image S. Jouin pic.twitter.com/kXKhspiImA

— BOAM (@BOAM_meteore) 18 March 2016

And further reports came to us from Benningbroek, Netherlands

Big fireball -13 over the UK captured by Allsky EN95 Benningbroek #fireball @UKMeteorNetwork @NUnl @UKMeteorNetwork pic.twitter.com/bsdlSOu8Ir

— Jos Nijland (@Jos_Nijland) 17 March 2016