The closure error of 0.74 km represents a 0.21 degree measurement error of the fireball image taken at Placitas, consistent with residuals for the 94 stars used to determine the optical image transformation. The projected ground location is close to Wagon Mound, NM about 40 miles northeast of Las Vegas, NM.

Leonid meteor breakup recorded at 1:32 am MST at Placitas, NM. The small red circles mark the 94 SAO catalog stars used to define the transformation to celestial coordinates. The meteor breakup is the bright spot on the left side surrounded by the large circle. This all-sky image was taken with an equi-angle fisheye telecentric lens assembly, filtered in the Na 590.0 nm band, and recorded on a Princeton Instruments scientific-grade CCD with 1024×1024 pixel format binned to 512×512. The camera location was approximately 35.29 N, 106.46 W at an altitude of 6200 ft. Images consisted of 90 second exposures taken with a start time synchronized with the beginning of each even minute. Camera alignment is shown by the two crossed red lines. North is just left of the top center and East is just below the left center. Camera preparation and image collection was performed by W.T. Armstrong of Los Alamos National Laboratory in support of meteor trail studies by M. Kelley of Cornell U.

Published paper: Coordinated Observations of Two Large Leonid Meteor Fireballs over Northern New Mexico and Computer Model Comparisons , J. Zinn, et al., Meteoritics & Planetary Science 34, 1007-1015 (1999).

Scientific Questions

The most interesting and surprising aspect of the ROTSE lapsed time sequence is the duration: more than one half hour. There are two rival models for this behavior which various scientific groups expect to investigate. This particular event was seen by several different optical instruments in northern New Mexico, each operating with a different optical filter. We hope that these various cameras will help resolve this controversy. From the dispersion of the afterglow with time, we can also measure the velocity of the winds at 80 km altitude.

The ROTSE collaboration collected more than 400 sky images during the morning of November 17, 1998. This data will be analyzed over the coming months for other meteor fireballs to gather statistics about shower direction and particle size.

The images shown here were displayed on two different occasions on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day web site. The first was on November 23, 1998, several days after the actual event: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap981123.html. A year later, on November 17, 1999, NASA showed the ROTSE images again to help entice sky gazers with what might be in store for them that night. See https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap991117.html.