Paul: I've had one other observation of a fireball at a similar time to yours on July 20-21 so far, seen from a site in Galloway. I'm not sure the two sightings were of the same object however, as the Galloway report was timed at 22:00 UT, and the meteor from there crossed the mid northern to mid northeastern skies, which would make it difficult to reconcile with your northwesterly start position, given how much further south you are than Galloway. Consequently, I'd welcome any more precise details on the start and end positions you saw to try to correlate the two.
Any fresh observations of this fireball, or any others (a fireball is a meteor that reaches at least magnitude -3), would be very welcome. If you have not yet done so, please forward me as full a report as possible. The minimum details I need are:
1) Exactly where you were (name of nearest town or large village, plus latitude and longitude ideally);
2) The date and timing of the event (please be sure to state whether this was in clock time, currently BST in Britain, or GMT/UT, which is BST minus one hour); and
3) Where the fireball started and ended in the sky, as accurately as possible, or where the first and last points you could see of the trail were if you didn't see the whole flight.
More advice and a fuller set of details to send are outlined on the "Fireball Observing" page of the SPA website, at:
http://www.popastro.com/sections/meteor/fireball.htm .
Alastair McBeath,
Meteor Director, Society for Popular Astronomy.
E-mail: <meteor@popastro.com> (messages under 150 kB in size only, please)
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