Seen the Russian meteor videos? West Seattle’s Alice Enevoldsen explains in a ‘cheat sheet’

That’s just one of many videos Russian news organizations are circulating, showing what’s reported to be a meteor that streaked through Central Russian skies late last night our time.

View Larger Map

While the videos are everywhere this morning, but information isn’t as abundant – so we wanted to let you know that West Seattle’s own Solar System Ambassador Alice Enevoldsen has been researching it – here’s the latest update on her Alice’s Astro Info website. (After we tweeted that link, a member of the WSB Twitter community, Kelley Bevans, summarized it as a “Russian meteor cheat sheet.”) Alice also is writing a periodic “Skies Over West Seattle“ roundup for WSB – the asteroid flyby (apparently NOT related to the meteor) was in the very first edition.

happy February 15, 2013 (9:29 am)

Thanks, Alice! I’d wondered about the “meteor” being related to N. Korea’s nuclear test, and with your diagram…. Interesting.

WSB, thanks for the great links!

Joe Szilagyi February 15, 2013 (9:38 am)

The worst and scariest thing is that no one saw it coming this time. That blast wave from it hitting the mesosphere blew out windows and doors and did damage in a massive area, with 500+ people injured and counting so far. Imagine if the focus of that blast wave had come down in Moscow or in any majorly populated area, rather than the equivalent of the deep suburbs for them.

Dakota February 15, 2013 (9:59 am)

Chelyabinsk may be far away from Moscow but its population is over a million people. The explosion was also seen in Yekaterinburg, another million plus city.

I was born in that area, and of course, am very curios about this event. It is quite fascinating to read Russian forums and all the rumors.

WSB February 15, 2013 (10:08 am)

thanks, Dakota. I put Chelyabinsk on the map because that’s what has been most commonly mentioned in stories so far, and I just wanted some sort of perspective of where on the vast Eurasian continent this happened. This could start a fad of Americans driving with dashcams – the most fascinating sidebar to the story so far.

Robert February 15, 2013 (10:08 am)

Seattle had a very minor version of this back in 2004 – woke some of us up.

http://www.komonews.com/news/archive/4126126.html?tab=video&c=y

Robert February 15, 2013 (10:48 am)

WSB,

I heard that in Russia you can save on your insurance premium if you have a dash can in your car which explains why so many have them there. Helps verify who is at fault in an accident.

WSB February 15, 2013 (11:43 am)

I can’t go find the link again right now but BusinessInsider.com had a story from just this past December about dashcams in Russia with video examples of why so many use them – road rage, car crashes, bad driving, it was … something.