Kevin, i am a sucker for a bit of an amateur astro mystery, so i took the liberty of examining your awesome pic. I make the bright path of this meteor to be 12-13º in travel length, the bright star in the top of the trees in bottom right hand corner is Achernar at around magnitude +0.4 and the brightest star in lower top left hand corner is Fomalhaut at mag. +1.15. I guess the bightest part of the meteors path would have to be at least around maybe mag -4, especially to have made such an impression on the viewers I suppose? I tried to link it to any showers but couldnt, using the 2.5x distance travelled rule, also couldnt find any known radiants any closer to the meteor on trajectory path (seeing that "fireballs" are sometimes exempt from that rule, due them being able to penetrate deeper and sooner due to larger size of nucleus possibly) I make the point of origin to be very roughly around
RA 20h dec -33, seeing the PA of path in direction of origin is about 284.2 ish.
Thanks for the sky puzzle, they are a great brain tease - who needs crosswords
Cheers
kearn
PS yes we also tried many, many times to capture meteors on film (even had a go at 1600 speed) and had a heck of a time getting much. We spent two mornings once - total of 10 hours trying to get meteors on film/tracking for a composite with 28mm lenses ect. during Eta Aquarids 2003 - got one piss-ant ETA in shots!! course you see awesome ones while rolling film on, or just out of fov of camera LOL they are very camera shy.
Kearn