meteor fireball over North Dakota and Minnesota
© Google/AMS (screen capture)
An unusual sighting for many people Sunday night, reports of a huge flash in the sky about 6 p.m. It has many people wondering what they saw and how typical this is.

"It will be bright so it will catch your eye if you are looking the right way," said MSUM Astronomy Professor Juan Cabanela.

Hundreds of people commented on the Valley News Live Facebook page about a huge fireball in the sky.

"I would count myself lucky in the sense that is a really cool thing to see," stated Cabanela.

A report from Red Lake, Minnesota said "I was in the woods with some friends and we seen a bright white light, lit up everything in the woods."

Another from Grafton North, Dakota, "I seen a huge flash and nothing else. It was unexplainable."

"Fireballs are fairly rare, they are the biggest of the meteors and so they also tend to be sporadic and not necessarily always associated with a meteor shower," explained Cabanela.

A map from the American Meteor Society, a place that tracks meteor sightings, shows that 67 people reported this fireball. The sightings were reported mainly in North Dakota and Minnesota but also in South Dakota and Manitoba, Canada.

"That's where they think it came in roughly," explained Cabanela while pointing to the trajectory on the map.

Cabanela says the reports show this fireball was larger than most, about baseball size and thinks it was about 20-30 miles high in the sky.

"You can typically see them, from a couple hundred miles out is not crazy," stated Cabanela.

Cabanela says fireballs typically travel at 30 miles per second and are seen daily from somewhere across the world.

"We just happen to get one over a fairly populated area. We had nice weather last night," said Cabanela.

The Taurids metor shower is happening but Cabanela doesn't think this fireball was a part of that.

"It looks like this came from North to the South which would not have been associated with the Taurids,"

Cabanela says if you are one of the lucky ones that see one of these fireballs in the future or saw the one last night, you should report it to the American Meteor Society.

We've posted the link to the site on the side. It takes only a few minutes and asks you questions, like what you saw, when and where.