MONTROSE - When a meteor exploded Friday at 2:44 a.m. over Montrose it was serendipity defined for Montrose High School teacher Mike Nadiak and the All-Sky club he oversees.
Nadiak is an earth and space science teacher at the high school, and Friday afternoon was the last scheduled meeting for the eight to 10 students who were taking part in the statewide All-Sky network, a project sponsored by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science that has digital cameras set up on the rooftops of various schools around the state.
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"Coincidently, this was the last day the club was meeting this year," Nadiak said, as an image of the meteor was projected on a large screen in his classroom. "They're still analyzing the information, but the debris is probably spread over Montrose. When they refine the data, we will have a better idea of how big it was and where the debris might be."
The All-Sky club is part of the school's Geoscience club. Each morning, the students check whether the camera picked anything up the night before. Some nights it's just planes circling the airport, but last night the camera recorded the meteor.
"It's a great privilege to be a part of this (All-Sky program)," said senior Kiel Brennan, who is president of the All-Sky club. "I will go look for pieces of it once they get a better idea of where they might be."
While the students ate their ice cream, Nadiak briefed them on the latest information about the meteor from a Web site.
"We were eating lunch outside when Mr. Nadiak came out and said to come in if we wanted to see something really cool," said Christine Kessler, a junior and past president of the All-Sky club. "I'm the type of person who will sit on a sleeping bag until 3 a.m. hoping to see a meteor, so this was pretty exciting."
It was the second time in two years that the All-Sky camera at MHS caught a meteor blazing across the sky. The last large meteor in the area was Nov. 28, 2002, on Thanksgiving around sunset, but Friday's meteor was even brighter than the first one.
Physicist Chris L. Peterson, a member of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's meteorite investigation team, saw images of the meteor from several cameras, including one from his Cloudbait Observatory in Guffey, Colo.
"This one is much brighter than the one from Thanksgiving," Peterson said. "Unlike the one that dropped around the Black Canyon, this one probably fell on yards and streets in Montrose. It was just a huge explosion overhead since it was coming straight over Montrose."
Peterson said he couldn't say for sure what size the meteor was yet, but he guessed it was larger than the Thanksgiving meteor, which was the size of a filing cabinet. He said residents should be on the lookout for black, shiny rocks with a smooth, uniform texture on the outside. The most common type of meteor rock looks like concrete on the inside if it broke on impact.
The All-Sky network has 10 cameras mounted on the rooftops of schools around the state and one on top of the Denver Museum.
To capture the images, the camera looks down into a convex mirror, which looks up into the sky and shows a field of view almost down to the horizon. The camera is connected to a computer, which runs a meteor detection program. Because the camera is always on, any moving light-emitting object in the sky is recorded as a digital image on the computer.
A computer program identifies movement in the sky and records only the sections where something has occurred. Students then watch the saved clips to sort out airplanes and other nonmeteorites before sending them to a database at the museum to be studied.
For more information on the meteor, or to provide information if you saw it, go to Peterson's Web site at www.cloudbait.com.
Contact Mike Robuck via e-mail at
miker@montrosepress.com.
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