If you have never seen a fireball lighting up the night sky I bet you will appreciate the video below, which was taken by Ivaldo Cervini over Italian skies a few days ago. It is a Perseid meteor, which lit up at a visual magnitude of approximately -10 (for comparison, the brigthest Venus can get is -4.5, and the full moon is -12.5: -10 is roughly 200 times brighter than Venus, and a tenth of the full moon).
It is a quite rare occurrence to see such a bright meteor: in over a hundred hours of active observation of meteors, I only saw one which might be compared to the one above. Luckily, nowadays video cameras with sufficient sensitivity are not horribly expensive as they used to be, and many amateurs have started surveillance programs.
Some technical data for the curious among you: the meteor in the clip appeared at 22.07UT on August 10th. The video was recorded by a surveillance camera in Breganzona, Lat. 46°00'08"N, Long. 8°55'31"E. The bright dot toward which the meteor points is Jupiter, which is currently at its maximum brightness (about -2.8). The camera (a Mintron MTV) mounted a Pentax CCTV lens of focal length of 6mm, F1.2.
For more information please visit the web site of the author of this lucky footage.
