fireball path
Fireball path
An especially bright meteor streaked through the sky at around 8 pm on Friday evening. The Ursa Astronomical Association has logged more than 230 sightings of the southbound fireball.

The phenomenon is known as a bolide, an extremely bright meteor that usually explodes in Earth's atmosphere.

A local Oulu man, Markku Paaso, managed to hastily record the atmospheric ball of light with his car dashboard video camera as the bolide fell in its horizontal trajectory.

"It was like a slow-moving, super-bright shooting star," one Yle reader recounts in their sighting.


Friday's bolide is the second bright aerial anomaly logged in Finland this winter. In November a rare fireball was sighted in Lapland that caused a stir in the skywatching community for its fierce brightness. The undestroyed refuse from that earlier meteorite fell to the Earth in Northern Lapland, where it still remains.