Ive spent most of this week watching the same nine seconds of footage over and over, from about forty different angles, and I still havent gotten tired of it.
If you missed it (how, though): early Friday morning a meteor came in over Chelyabinsk, Russia, burned up in the atmosphere, and the shockwave blew out windows across the city. Something like 1,500 people got hurt, mostly from flying glass, not from anything actually hitting them. Nobody died, which given the scale of the thing is honestly kind of amazing. And completely separately, later that same day, an asteroid called 2012 DA14 passed closer to Earth than our own weather satellites. NASA had to put out a statement explaining that no, these two things are not related, it's just an extremely weird coincidence of timing. Two unrelated space rocks, same Friday.
But the part Ive been thinking about isnt the astronomy. Its that we had usable, clear, multi-angle video of the meteor within literally minutes, from ordinary people, before a single news organization had confirmed anything.
Why? Dashcams. Everybody in Russia has one.
I didnt know this until this week and apparently its been true for years. Insurance fraud is rampant enough over there, and traffic cops corrupt enough, that drivers started mounting little video cameras to their windshields just to have proof of what actually happened if theyre ever in an accident or pulled over. Its not a tech enthusiast thing, its not a gadget-blog thing, its just what you do if you own a car. So when a fireball brighter than the sun streaked across the sky at 9:20 in the morning, half the moving vehicles in Chelyabinsk were already recording, pointed roughly the right direction, running continuously, with a timestamp burned into the corner of the frame.
Compare that to how footage of a big unexpected event usually reaches us. Somebody has to think to grab their phone, unlock it, open the camera app, and get it framed, and by the time all that happens the interesting part is often already over. A dashcam skips every one of those steps because its already on. It doesnt know its capturing something historic, it's just doing its dumb little job of recording the road, and this time the road happened to have a meteor over it.
By Friday afternoon there were compilation videos on YouTube stitching together a dozen different dashcam angles of the same fifteen seconds, synced up so you could watch the flash, then watch different people flinch at the boom a beat or two later depending on how far they were from it. That delay between the light and the sound is the detail that got me, actually — you can literally see the distance in the reaction times. Some guy is calmly driving along, bright flash goes by, nothing happens for a few seconds, and then his whole car shudders and he swears and yanks the wheel a little. That's not something a news crew show up two hours later reconstructs. That's a coincidence of ten thousand cheap cameras already running.
I will say, the conspiracy corners of the internet had a field day with all this footage too, because there was so much raw material to pick through frame by frame that people started finding "anomalies" in compression artifacts and calling them secondary objects. Ignore all that, it's just video noise and jpeg-style compression doing what compression does at low bitrates. Not everything blurry is a second meteor.
Anyway I ordered one of these dashcams off Amazon two nights ago, a cheap $45 no-name one with a suction mount, mostly because Ive got a commute full of bad drivers and partly, I'll admit, because watching forty strangers accidentally document the same fifteen seconds of history made me a little jealous I dont have a camera running every time I drive anywhere. Itll probably sit in a drawer collecting dust within a month, like everything else I impulse buy at 11pm. But if a meteor goes over my neighborhood I want in on it too.