I guess the Russians are used to this kind of thing. I do love that almost every vehicle there has a GoPro type recording device. I thought it deserved at least a WoW! or perhaps a H@[Y S#!T, but this is Russia! Remain calm its just another massive explosion and fireball in the sky! I think I would've laid a rather large kerfuffle in my panties!
It turned out it was a massive explosion on the ground, and one bright enough that it lit the clouds. It only looked as if it was higher up. There has yet to be an explanation of what exploded.
Spidey, they look random to me Any flat map is a distortion of roundish earth. Here high latitudes (like Russia) ought to be squished, thus the dots closer together. But I'm still going with random. Occam would slice me if I did not. The back story about how such maps get created is interesting.
Cartography would be a lot easier if the Flat Earth crowd were right. I wouldn't be so sure about Willian of Ockham. Being a Franciscan, he might just say that GOD is pissed at the Rooskies - if also ineffective with his rock throwing. Me? I'll go with pseudo-random.
We had one here back in 2008. I saw an immense flash of light in my rear-view mirror, which was quite startling for a few seconds, but then it was gone. I wasn't as big as the one in Russia, but because it happened over a sparsely-populated area called "Buzzard Coulee" it wasn't worthy of many news headlines. I believe a police car caught it on a dash-camera.
One thing seems wrong about the bolide map. There should be many more of the smallest symbols than the next size up. Same for the largers. possibly the smallest. 1 gigajoule are undersampled by detection technology. Or possibly some image resolution was lost because this came from a secondary source. original map is at NASA, somewhere.
