Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Screamer

This SOB came in last night. The way I knew that is because it made a heinous howl and I heard it from the next room. Each meteor is recorded visually and creates a tone. There are two separate tones, and I'm not sure how that works exactly, but if the blip is to the left there's one tone, and if it's to the right, another. Something like this behemoth causes both tones to chime at once and it makes a dissonant, two-note chord. When this one came in it made a warbling, bloody howl that was yet another first for me on this site.
 I was about to walk through the door to go outside when I heard it. It reminded me of the ending of the song "The Talking Drum" from "Lark's Tongues in Aspic" by King Crimson. The song ends with a screeching violin that sounds like a cross between an unpleasant visit to the dentist and a fire alarm in Hell. I didn't listen to that album for a year after that. Anyway the laptop was two rooms away. I thought my ears were playing tricks on me since I've been hearing these two tones for going on a month now, but I realized it was real, and I grabbed the phone and backed up the video and snapped a pic. This is a beast. I'd like to know how high it was when it exploded. One like this could be a real game-changer of it got too close.
 Small meteors which only last a second or two, like the ones you might happen to look up and catch on any given night, are about as big as a grain of sand. Ones that last a few seconds are about the size of a grain of rice. It seems hard to believe that something that tiny can put on such a big show, but friction is some powerful stuff. After rice-grain size it goes up roughly like so: Raisinettes, peanut M&Ms, cherry tomatoes, shooter marbles (if you know what those are), golf balls, kumquats, grapefruit, bowling balls, breadboxes, ovens, cars, buses, houses, etc. I have no idea how big some of these monsters are, but I do know that there's a site in Canada I believe, that plots these meteors on a 3D, horizontal graph, and some of them have caused it to clip, or slice off the tops of the biggest peaks. In other words the graph isn't made to record such meteors, if that tells you anything. They're literally off the charts. Tryin' to tell you something.
 There's a guy from Germany in the chat room right now. He seems to be talking to himself, but he's saying all this stuff about velocity, crater formation, pressure, debris formation and such. I'm trying to learn what I can but it's over my head; just like these crazy meteors. I do know that the number of videos about this is growing by the minute. I've got livemeteors on the taskbar and I'm pulling that up every two minutes, and I see thumbnails with these images in Youtube, and I've already put up a million posts with these images. Sometimes it takes a minute to figure out which one I'm looking at. It's a maelstrom of meteors. Heads-up.

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