Fireball spotted South West of the UK on May, 12th 2022

More than 500 reports from 4 countries

The AMS received more than 500 reports so far about a fireball event that occurred South West of the UK on May 12th, 2022 around 00:40 AM BST* (May 11th 23:40 Universal Time). The AMS #2022-2823 event was mainly seen from England and Wales (UK) but we also received reports from France, The Netherlands and Guernsey. Most of these reports came from the UKMON (UK Meteor Network) version of the AMS fireball form. We also received reports from other version: International Meteor Organization, Vigie-Ciel, and the Society for Popular Astronomy.

*BST = British Summer Time

The ground trajectory computed from the witness reports shows that the meteor was traveling from South West to North East and ended its visible flight over Wales.

Caught by at least 2 camera networks

At least 2 cameras networks caught the event: FRIPON (french) and UKMON. Their computed trajectories are below:

You can find more details about the UKMON trajectory here.

Videos

So far, we received 9 videos of this fireball – all accessible from the event page.

Fireball, Bolide?

Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth’s atmosphere each day. The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight. Those that occur at night also stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them.

Additionally, the brighter the fireball, the more rare is the event. As a general thumb rule, there are only about 1/3 as many fireballs present for each successively brighter magnitude class, following an exponential decrease. Experienced observers can expect to see only about one fireball of magnitude -6 (crescent moon) or better for every 200 hours of meteor observing, while a fireball of magnitude -4 (Venus) can be expected about once every 20 hours or so.

Tags: England fireball UK Wales

Vincent Perlerin

Vincent Perlerin, PhD used to be a researcher in Computational Linguistics. He is now a software developer, a web designer, a community manager, an illustrator and many other things. He is working on the American Meteor Society under the supervision of Mike Hankey. Vincent is the lead developer of all the AMS projects. He's also the lead developer of the International Meteor Organization Website and the IMO online Databases management system.