Something blew the fuck up late last night. I mistook it for thunder or my lead-footed upstairs neighbor. It seems, I was wrong on both counts.

Around 11 p.m. a loud boom was reported in southeast Huntsville, east Limestone, Morgan and Marshall counties.

Across 5 counties this was heard. I heard and *felt* it. Rattled the building, it did. If you follow the link you see that the typical Huntsville geek, named Opticron, has taken it upon himself to be Super Geektastic (not in a good way) and track the latitude and longitude of the origin.

• 11:08:40 – lat,lon:34.678905,-86.577587
• 11:08:55 – lat,lon:34.738756,-86.678481

Who is the bigger geek, him for tracking or me for bothering to Google Map it, I’ll let you decide. I just want to know what blew the hell up. (Looking at you, Redstone Arsenal.)

(via me)

EDIT: The reigning theory is a sonic boom from an aircraft. I’m cool with that, although I’ve no idea why you would test aircraft here. I wasn’t even sure military jets bothered to land here. It’s mostly helicopters and rockets round these parts.

UPDATE: And so the Arsenal admits to blowing up half a million dollar rocket late into the night.

Around 11 p.m. a loud boom was reported in southeast Huntsville, Limestone, Morgan, Marshall, Lawrence and DeKalb counties.

The slow cook-off test involves placing a rocket engine in a stove-like piece of equipment and heating it until the engine blows. Normally the tests are scheduled to explode in the afternoons, but this one ran later – much later.

The low clouds helped carry the sound to at least five surrounding counties.

Before the Arsenal released a statement, The Andalusia Star News had speculations.