Two fireballs explode within one hour over Belgium, another over southern Germany hours later

Two fireballs occurred within a period of one hour on April 1, 2020, over Belgium. The first one was spotted by the FRIPON network's four stations at around 22:57 UTC while the second was captured by three cameras at 23:33 UTC (00:57 LT and 01:33 LT on April 2, respectively).

At around 01:52 UTC on April 2, (03:52 LT), another fireball streaked across the skies of neighboring country Germany– just less than two hours later.

The network calculated the trajectories for both events over Belgium based on the recorded data, and both appear to have parallel trails.

Image credit: FRIPON, IMO

Several cameras from the CAMS network in Grapfontaine were also able to capture the fireballs. BRAMS had detected the events as well– the first one, however, generated a minor overdense meteor echo and only the stations in Limburg and East of Belgium were able to spot it.

Image credit: CAMS/IMO

The fireball was barely visible from the center of the country, while it was not totally seen in the western area. The second one, on the other hand, generated a stronger signal, which saturated several receivers and was detected by most of the BRAMS stations.

Image credit: FRIPON/IMO

Spectrograms of both events registered by the Humain station show that the first fireball had an echo in the middle and was not as bright as the second one.

Image credit: BRAMS/IMO

The third fireball exploded over Southern Germany two hours after the two consecutive fireballs over Belgium. 

The AllSky6 cameras in Seysdorf (left) and Gahberg (right) were able to take images of the event:

Image credit: IMO

Featured image credit: CAMS/IMO