[HN Gopher] Meteor Just Seen in Portugal
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       Meteor Just Seen in Portugal
        
       Author : gehwartzen
       Score  : 90 points
       Date   : 2024-05-19 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
        
       | perihelions wrote:
       | I had the luck to see one these in person--an absolutely
       | brilliant fireball in sparking white.
       | 
       | Maybe if I reorganize my flow to spend more hours outside in the
       | evenings I can fool statistics into showing me a second one.
        
         | sebastiennight wrote:
         | Ah, the good old mathematical law
         | num_lifetime_meteor_sightings = tan(pi * n/48)
         | 
         | Where n= daily hours spent outside looking at the sky
        
           | perihelions wrote:
           | It's fucking up my equation to continue investigating this,
           | but, shouldn't this be a simple Poisson distribution
           | (constant rate)? What model are you doing that has a
           | trigonometric tan
        
             | scarmig wrote:
             | I think it's a joke; imagine you spent 24 hours a day
             | looking at the sky.
        
       | genman wrote:
       | Just i.e. almost a day ago.
        
       | matosinhos wrote:
       | I saw this last night in Matosinhos - north Portugal outside of
       | Porto.
       | 
       | This is a town that happened to have its biggest celebration of
       | the year last night. It's called Festas do Senhor de Matosinhos.
       | 
       | The meteor made an appearance 15 minutes before midnight. The big
       | fireworks were to go off at midnight. We all thought it was the
       | weirdest firework we'd ever seen and only later realized it was a
       | meteor.
       | 
       | It was truly huge. And lit the ground blue.
       | 
       | The really interesting part of this is that the festival is to
       | celebrate a miracle in the town wherein a vision of Jesus
       | appeared a long time ago.
       | 
       | I am not religious. But wow. Quite a coincidence.
       | 
       | Posting under a fresh account for location privacy, of course.
       | 
       | Maybe this sounds unbelievable but here is the program of the
       | festival where you can see that the fireworks happen:
       | 
       | https://www.leca-palmeira.com/senhor-de-matosinhos-4/
       | 
       | And here's the wiki about the reason for the festival:
       | 
       | https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matosinhos#Etnografia
        
         | samaritano wrote:
         | oh no, now every believer will start seeing god's plan
         | everywhere...
        
       | agile-gift0262 wrote:
       | My first thought seeing the video: wow, I'd love to see something
       | like that in person.
       | 
       | Immediate second though: so grateful for our atmosphere
        
         | DrNosferatu wrote:
         | It was quite sensational:
         | 
         | It was cloudy over me, so no bolide - I only saw slowly rising
         | to 100% saturation brightness outside, during pitch-black
         | night. (sonic boom a couple of minutes later).
         | 
         | I gave it a 20% chance it was a nuke from Putin :D
        
       | r0ckarong wrote:
       | Kame-hame-...
        
       | franky47 wrote:
       | Solar eclipse, auroras, and now a meteor: space weather has been
       | a lot of fun lately.
        
       | belter wrote:
       | Of Cometary Origin. Seen over Portugal and Spain:
       | 
       | https://news.sky.com/story/blue-fireball-flashes-in-night-sk...
       | 
       | Some beautiful images:
       | 
       | https://x.com/esaoperations/status/1792106330267799685
       | 
       | https://x.com/travolax/status/1792004429173916132
       | 
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1cvtfuw/b...
        
         | TheBlight wrote:
         | >travelling at roughly 28 miles per second.
         | 
         | That's (~45 km/s) pretty close to the Sun's escape velocity
         | from Earth (~42 km/s). I wonder if there's a chance it's
         | interstellar.
        
       | fanf2 wrote:
       | This is the IMO Fireball report: the event happened about 24h ago
       | https://fireballs.imo.net/members/imo_view/event/2024/2481
        
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       (page generated 2024-05-19 23:00 UTC)