LogFAQs > #975431624

LinkPizza posted...

Oh. Like it was kind of heading toward in a more head on fashion, then burned up which is why it got bright and disappeared?

Precisely. It's the same thing you see when they move sideways, only toward you, so you don't see the tail. While space is obviously 3-dimensional, the sky we see is effectively a 2D image from the extremely limited perspective we have. That means we generally aren't going to be able to see motion in the Z axis (treating the sky as the XY plane) and any object travelling entirely along that axis will appear stationary. Theoretically, with the proper instruments, one could identify that Z-axis motion, but with the naked eye and the reality that these shooting stars can appear anywhere in the sky without warning, you aren't going to detect it.