On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Mark Shelton wrote:
It was up by the moon and heading west.
The moon was in the southwest at 8pm The meteor tracked from from northeast to southwest. I think it's unlikely they are related. Based on the size of the hole they've found in the lake ice (probably 30 feet wide), it seems a very significant chunk of this thing made it to the ground. I can't wait for them to fish it out and analyze it. Everything I've read indicates that the blast came from the sonic boom as it passed by, not the terminal explosion. Most of the damage seems to be relatively distant from the landing sites and occurred 4-5 minutes after the object passed over, which is interesting when you consider the speed of sound, height of the atmosphere, etc. It seems to indicate this thing was ripping a pretty good hole in the upper atmosphere when it came in (as if that isn't obvious from the pictures and video). Some pretty impressive video at http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/meteorite-crash-reported-in-russia And this is just a very small asteroid! Jared