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Yukon Meteor Flash Caught on Film
By Robin Lloyd
Senior Science Writer
posted: 06:37 am ET
28 January 2000
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yukon_flash_000128 An alert Canadian man snapped an illuminating sequence of photos of the gaseous trail left in Earth's atmosphere minutes after a recent meteor explosion over the Yukon Territory. The flash occurred around 8:45 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 18 over the remotely populated stretch of northwestern Canada, said Ewald Lemke, a 63-year-old realtor who posted the images he took on his Atlin Realty Online website. Lemke writes that he started taking pictures outside his realty office in Atlin, British Columbia, just south of the Yukon border, within two minutes of the "flash," at which time the vapor trail appeared reddish (below). 
"I had all the lights on in the office and was working on the computer and this whole room lit up," Lemke said. "The whole room was three times brighter. So what's going on? I ran outside thinking something had exploded, but I didn't hear a noise. The noise came some time later," he said. He continued to take photographs as the trail changed (below). 
The final picture in a quick series of four was taken 14 minutes after the first in the series (below), with the vapor trail extending significantly. 
By 18 minutes after the flash, Lemke says the trail extended beyond the frame allowed by the camera's lens (below). 
Finally, 45 minutes after the flash, the trail was still visible under a cloud, as shown in the photo at the top of this story. Lemke used a digital camera for the shots, because it's a long drive to get conventional film developed, he said. NASA dispatched its Airborne Sciences ER 2 from the Dryden Space Flight Center in the Mojave Desert in California to the scene on January 21, where it combed the skies in search of traces of the massive meteor.The meteor exploded at an altitude of 16 miles (25 kilometers) with the energy of two to three kilotons of TNT -- rattling houses, knocking snow off roofs and shaking seismic monitors in the region. The detonation produced two sonic booms and a sizzling sound over Alaska and northwestern Canada, according to a NASA news release. Lemke said it sounded like a snow load falling onto his building. "But there was no snow, so I wondered what the heck it was," he said. "Then, when people talked about a sonic boom, I connected the two events." Two small paddles mounted on the ER 2, and coated in sticky silicon oil, collected particles during the one-day, round-trip expedition. The paddles have been sealed hermetically and returned to NASA's Johnson Space Center where they will be analyzed by cosmic meteorologist Michael Zolenski.The results will come in two weeks, NASA says, giving scientists an opportunity to learn more about the meteor's origin and composition. Chief Pasadena Correspondent Andrew Bridges contributed to this story.
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