I know the last couple of posts have been meteor orientated, but I am totally blown away by the footage I have seen.
Christo van Graan, who stays in Burgersfort in the Limpopo Province, sent me this video clip from one of his security camera’s of the meteor that appeared over South Africa on Saturday evening, 21 November 2009
From Christo:
“Marc, this is a security cam recording of Saturday 21/11/09 from S 24 40.793 E 030 19.763. My cam is facing East. Situated at my house in Burgersfort on the border of Limpopo and Mpumalanga. Meteor was moving from east to North.”
The comments have been flying in thick and fast, and it seems that loads of people saw this phenomenon. By the sounds of things, the meteor may have landed or disintegrated somewhere over or near the Botswana/South Africa border.
Today I came across this video I found on Youtube taken from a CCTV camera located on the Mustek building in Midrand (Link to Google Map). I am totally totally awed by what I have just seen.
I have also just come across a 2nd video of the Gauteng meteor from a building somewhere in Johannesburg. This one is really cool as you get a full view of the horizon, and it is also slowed down.
On Saturday evening, 21 November, my wife and I were driving home on the N2 near Ballito, from my year-end function, at about 22:30. suddenly the whole sky lit up to a greenish/blueish colour. Soon after that there was flash that flew over our heads. It kinda looked like a lightning blot, but there weren’t any clouds in the sky.
I immediately jumped onto twitter, and found that we weren’t the only ones to see this. It sounded like it was a lot brighter in over Johannesburg & Centurion, with a couple of people even saying they may have thought it had reached the ground as well. After checking around, it looked like what we saw was a rather rare occurrence, in that a we saw a meteor in the sky that was close to earth. I have never seen anything like this, and it was phenomenal.
After doing a bit more investigation, in the morning, it sound like it didn’t actually hit the ground, as meteors generally burn up as they hit the earths atmosphere.It also looks like it could be part the Leonid shower which is meteoroid dust from the tail of Halley’s Comet! Although, that may not be 100% correct, as this was scheduled to happen on the 17th of November.
The Weather Service has a blog post about it here, where a couple of people have commented about this. The Times also has an article on with comment from the guys at the Johannesburg planetarium. So far, it doesn’t seem anyone has pictures of this rare occurrence, but hopefully we can get lucky, and get a similar picture to that of a Utah surveillance camera that picked up a meteor shower in Utah last week. Wikipedia also has a very interesting read about Meteor Showers
Did you see the Meteor on Saturday night ? If you did leave a comment, if anyone has pictures let me know, and I will gladly put them up :)
A couple of weeks ago, my mate & colleague Shaun Trennery came to me and said he had a brain wave about a new project. He wanted to put together a site that allowed us to interview regular South African’s like you and me, about our lives in South Africa, and what makes us happy and sad about living here. Throw in a few general fun questions, and boom, izimvo.com was born.
We launched the site this morning with a from Mike Stopforth about his views of living in South Africa, and how much he loves the Spur. Anybody wanting to have a lunch meeting with Mike, Spur is your answer :)
Shaun and I have been working on building up a list of potential people to interview, and are aiming high in trying to punch out a post every day or so for the next week or 2. We want to take a look at regular South Africans, from the Construction worker at the new stadium, to the CEO of a top 40 JSE company.
Keep your eyes on izimvo.com, I promise you, there are going to be a couple of interesting questions being fired off in the next couple of weeks…
I upgraded to iTunes 9, which has had a face lift. My favorite feature allows me to organise my apps on my phone from within iTunes
I upgraded my iPhone firmware to OS 3.1, which also seems a whole lot faster. As someone pointed out, may just be a placebo effect after seeing how much faster Snow Leopard runs, but it definitely does feel a lot faster
Tweetdeck also graced us with an upgrade. Much cleaner interface, and I wouldnt be lying when I say it also feels that much faster :)
Winston my Pigeon Booi, from DC, won his race against the ADSL upload. The win was monumental in pigeon terms, and Winston has gone on to break all sorts of other records, by appearing on loads of various websites, and also made an appearance on Sky News !!! Well done to @imsmith and the guys from The Unlimited. Fantastic campaign !!! And to think it all got going at the last 27 Dinner in Durbs :)
Finally, and definitely not least. I now have a full complement of tractors on my farm in Farmville. Now THATS geeky :)
