Bright Fireball over Northeast of France 2019 October 13

On Sunday morning, October 13th , a bright fireball appeared over the French districts Champagne and Lorraine at 06:50:13 CEST (04:50:13 UTC).

It started to brighten at an elevation of 90 km near Châlons-en-Champagne and finished its path near the German border after passing over Thionville (25 km south of Luxembourg).

The event was recorded by an allsky camera of the BOAM network, a French amateur meteor video network, located at Chaligny, 80 km South of the trajectory.

And a stations of the Swiss Fachgruppe Meteorastronomie at Val Terbi (Jura, Switzerland)

Two other close cameras of the CAMS BeNeLux network, at the Société Lorraine d’Astronomie observatory in Nancy had there CCD saturated by the brightness of the Fireball.

20191013_045013 Fireball as captured on CAMS 3900 at Nancy, France – S.L.A.

20191013_045013 Fireball as captured on CAMS 3901 at Nancy, France – S.L.A.

More than 150 observations from France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and even Italy were reported on the IMO event page.

map of 153 witnesses – IMO event 5026-2019

A trajectory could be calculated from two cameras working on UFOsuite software, Marco’s camera at Chaligny and Roger Spinner’s camera at Val Terbi. They recorded the fireball during 5 seconds and the initial velocity of the object was close to 27 km/s. It started to brighten at 90 km elevation and ended at 55 km with a maximum magnitude close of -10. Atmospheric entry angle was low, around 14°.

20191013_045013 fireball trajectory on ground map – UFOobit

UFOorbit results give a geocentric velocity of 24.4 km/s and radiant position R.A. : 30.6° , dec : -4.4°

20191013_045013 fireball radiant on sinusoidal projection sky map – UFoorbit

The FRIPON network computed the trajectory from its 12 captures. Results have been published on the IMO website : duration : 6s, start elevation : 90 km, end elevation 45 km, inclination : 19° initial speed : 27.31 km/s and the initial mass 2 kg.