It looks like my #infrasound monitor (a #RaspberryBoom) might have caught the sonic boom from a meteor that passed over the #Houston area this afternoon. Time is in UTC here.

The problem is - lots of things create infrasound. This is the loudest thing within that hour, and approximately the right time, but is it a sonic boom?

Sonic booms should have an N-shaped profile, as shown in this figure from their wikipedia article: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N-wave.png#/media/File:N-wave.png

File:N-wave.png - Wikimedia Commons

That figure shows the whole thing lasting ~.2s.

If we zoom in on my own data, you have to stretch a little bit to believe that it has the same N-shape, but it's not entirely wrong.

The initial peak is ~.1s, but the whole thing takes ~.6s (from 21:42:26.4 to 21:42:27)

It was certainly one of the loudest things today, and a broad-spectrum 'boom'.

(Ignore the really huge thing in the recent lower left, that was me rebooting the RaspberryBoom because I thought it was offline 😬)

The big thing in the quiet nighttime hours is a helicopter - those have a very distinct signature.

Helicopters are easy to spot because you can *see* the infrasound doppler shift as they go past your location.
So my verdict is that *maybe* this was the sonic boom, but it's awfully hard to be sure.
Here's the official notice of the event and the timing - which fits just fine: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/event/2026/1959
American Meteor Society

We received 105 reports about a fireball seen over TX on Saturday, March 21st 2026 around 21:39 UT.

Oh! And magnitude-wise, that's ~8 Pascals of overpressure, which equates to just under 0.2 lb/ft^2 on the wikipedia graph.

Oh! This is fun. RaspberryShake now lets you download 'audio' of these events (sped up many times, and therefore frequency shifted higher).

Here's what this event sounded like.

@grajohnt okay well now I know I need a Raspberry Shake to capture the periodic little 3.1 burblings that happen here in Sacramento and turn them into PHAT BEATS
@vxo they have gotten absurdly pricey since I bought mine many many years ago
@grajohnt I noticed that when my coworker was looking at them

@vxo there's a good chance there's one very near you, and you can just take the data from that :)

https://stationview.raspberryshake.org/#/?lat=38.57607&lon=238.47038&zoom=9.516

Oooh - there's only one in Sacramento, and it's pretty noisy.

Station View: Raspberry Shake Network & EQ Activity Map

Global map showing all live seismograph and infrasound Stations on our seismic network, with one of the most complete lists of recent earthquake activity.