Sorry have posted this elsewhere but am very curious, I know it's a poor picture but I only had my phone. Taken in central QLD on Friday 6th in the evening. Any Ideas?
Hi Jewel, it's hard to see what you have captured there, but it certainly could be a meteor. Meteorites are the remains of a meteor that are found on the ground after a strike.
You were lucky to get that shot off in time, was it traveling slowly?
Yes it was travelling slowly but when I used two points of reference it seemed to be pretty fast I wanted to stay and watch what happened but had to go.
Looking at the foreground and time on the picture, looks like the sun was low, so the sun could have been lighting up the contrail from a High flying Jet. It does look very similar to that.
I agree with Carl and Andrew, I often see contrails from jets heading west into the sunset in a clear sky and it freaked me out the first few times I saw it. Because the sunlight is lower than the plane, it reflects back down to you and gives a reddish yellow glow which I have often thought was a rocket re-entry or meteor.
Unfortunately the explanation is not that exciting....
It looks like a contrail to me. A lot of the planes flying to/from Sydney airport go over my house so at sunset and sunrise I usually see dozens of these beautiful contrails illuminated by the sun.
Contrail is just the exhaust left behind by the jet as it passes by. The gases of the hot exhaust condense into droplets, usually mixed with any water in the air at the altitude the plane is flying at, and forms a thin streaming cloud. Depending on the water vapour content of the atmosphere the plane is flying in, as well as the temperature, you can get a thick, thin or almost non existent contrail. Sometimes they disperse really quickly and other times they can hang around for ages, spreading out into rather large but insubstantial clouds.
