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I have always thought that a meteor enters the Earth's atmosphere and impacts the ground (if it doesn't disintegrate first) at an angle.
I saw something a few months ago which has bothered me ever since. I live in an area of farms, cow pastures and wilderness preserves. I was driving one night and noticed a very bright tiny red glowing object falling at a tremendous speed toward the earth, but "straight" down. It was moving so quickly that if I had blinked, I would have missed it. It appeared to have either disintegrated before hitting (as it vanished), or perhaps fell behind trees or a rise that I could not see because of the total darkness.
I estimate that the object, if it had impacted, would have been less than 1 mile from where I was.
There were no airplanes in the sky, because I was wondering if something had fallen from one.
My question - if you were to view a meteor falling from that short of a distance, would it be possible that it would appear to be falling straight down? Or would it still appear to strike at an angle?
I did a search on meteor trajectory, but all I could find was where high altitude trajectory was used to try to determine the possible impact site of a meteor, or seeing the meteor's trajectory from a significant distance, but nothing about seeing one fall very close.
I saw something a few months ago which has bothered me ever since. I live in an area of farms, cow pastures and wilderness preserves. I was driving one night and noticed a very bright tiny red glowing object falling at a tremendous speed toward the earth, but "straight" down. It was moving so quickly that if I had blinked, I would have missed it. It appeared to have either disintegrated before hitting (as it vanished), or perhaps fell behind trees or a rise that I could not see because of the total darkness.
I estimate that the object, if it had impacted, would have been less than 1 mile from where I was.
There were no airplanes in the sky, because I was wondering if something had fallen from one.
My question - if you were to view a meteor falling from that short of a distance, would it be possible that it would appear to be falling straight down? Or would it still appear to strike at an angle?
I did a search on meteor trajectory, but all I could find was where high altitude trajectory was used to try to determine the possible impact site of a meteor, or seeing the meteor's trajectory from a significant distance, but nothing about seeing one fall very close.