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Displaying items by tag: Meteorite

A fireball seen shooting through the skies above parts of Ireland on Wednesday evening has been captured on Dublin Bay webcam, passing over Dublin Bay and Dun Laoghaire Harbour. 

The fireball was a meteor, experts have said. The observed portion of the trajectory covered over 300 km.

It appeared high in the sky at Dun Laoghaire for just a few seconds. before 10 pm and appeared to plunge seawards in flashes of light green colours to observers on the south Dublin Bay shoreline. 

The UK Meteor Network said it had received almost 800 reports after the blazing orb that was spotted in the night sky over Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland on Wednesday evening.

Watch the asteroid particle appear top left of frame in the youtube vid below and move right to left as it passes by Dun Laoghaire Harbour.

The UK scientists said the object, which lasted more than 20 seconds, was "definitely a meteor", adding "we are now 100% confident this was a small part of an asteroid".

The network said the end of the meteor's journey was not observed on camera, but that it ended over the north Atlantic Ocean, some 50-100km west of the Isle of Islay, the southern-most island of the Inner Hebrides.

An updated tweet from the organisation read: "It (the meteor) came on an asteroidal orbit and entered the atmosphere at 14.2 km/s.

"The observed portion of the trajectory covered over 300 km.

"If any meteorites did fall, they ended up in the ocean."

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.