Fireball - stock image
Stock image
Eagle-eyed Eugene residents out and about around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday evening were treated to a spectacular display as a fireball flashed across the sky.

The American Meteor Society website received about 20 reports of a fireball that was extremely bright and broke up as it headed west. Many people reported that the fireball was green in color and lasted about two to three seconds.

Bob Grossfeld, observatory manager at the Oregon Observatory at Sunriver Nature Center, said he didn't see the fireball — most of central Oregon was socked in by cloud cover at the time. The object could have been a meteor from the tail end of a recent meteor shower or it might have been a bit of space junk returning to Earth, he said.

Jim Todd, director of Space Science Education at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, said meteors of this brightness, about the same brightness as the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky, are called fireballs. Fireballs that explode in a bright flash with visible fragments are called bolides.

Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth's sky each day, Todd said. However, many of them go unnoticed because they happen over an ocean, an uninhabited area or are masked by daylight. Those that happen at night may go unnoticed because no one was outside to see them.

Meteors that come to rest on Earth are called meteorites.

Todd said it's rare to find a meteorite because most meteors either burn up in the Earth's atmosphere or land in an ocean.