A ‘persistent train’ is a trail of ionized gases left behind some meteors when they heat up enough in the atmosphere to begin disintegrating. These trails can persist in the stratosphere for up to an hour, and can be visible to the naked eye for a short time. This bolide meteor captured from Bears Ears National Monument in April 2023 was detectable in the images for more than thirty minutes, however this composite image only used the brightest 27 minutes of gas movement.
The following timelapse video allows you to see the gas movement after the meteor passes (the video rotates due to being attached to a star tracker, which matches the rotation of the earth so that stars don’t ‘move’ over the course of many or long exposures.
