Night Sky Images #2 - A Green Meteor above Cape Town

It was a surprise to capture an image of a fairly bright green meteor which appeared below the Leo constellation during the early hours at 00h59 SAST on the 11th April 2022 above the Silvermine River Wetlands!

I attempted to create a time lapse from 50 individual images over a period of 9 minutes (from 00h50 - 00h59 SAST) which began with the moon setting behind a 2km distant hill alongside an 8km distant Chapmans Peak.

Thanks and appreciation to Timothy Cooper who plotted the meteor on a gnomonic chart and added that it appeared to be a bright Virginid.

Timothy kindly followed up with additional information to confirm the radiant of the meteor :

" I plotted your green meteor on the sphere of all meteor radiants captured by our CAMS cameras for the night of April 10/11. Good agreement with the Virginids which were the most active meteor shower that night ".

The meteor traveled at a speed of 30km - 40km per second, the green trail produced from nickel as it burned up in the atmosphere.

Video, SFX and original music sound track by Gary Deacon.

Thank you for watching!

Night sky images with the camera and through the telescope available at :