Sighting in Marnay, November 14, 2016

A motorist saw a white light move across the sky for about ten seconds at 18:14. They had seen shooting stars before, but were surprised that this one did not burn up and kept travelling westward. No other witness account was collected.

The investigation found that the description fitted a small, slow meteor that came from the east and crossed the sky in front of the witness heading west or south-west. A shooting star often has no clearly visible trail, especially when it is faint, because retinal persistence is then much weaker. In such cases, any colours and their possible changes are also hard to perceive. At that moment, the radiant of the Taurids meteor shower, near the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus, was just rising on the east-north-east horizon. Meteors from this shower, which is linked to comet 2P/Encke, are slow (about 29 km/s), which makes an observation lasting around ten seconds quite possible. GEIPAN concluded that the witness saw a shooting star and classified the case as A.