A million observers of the superbolide

Abstract

People seldom look into the sky – they are too busy with earthly things. On February 15, 2013, it would have been rare to find a citizen of Chelyabinsk scrutinizing the sky; certainly, nobody had a camera at the ready. This explains why there are almost no photographs of the bolide before the moment of its explosion. An exception to this was one resident of Chelyabinsk, Marat Akhmetvaleyev, who was standing with a camera on the bank of the Miass River and was preparing to take shots of the landscape as dawn broke. He was the only person to take a photograph of the bolide at the moment of the explosion (Fig. 2.1). However, the bolide had already reached such a brightness that no details are visible; rather, it is more like a cloud of shining white light.