Fire in the Sky
Residents of Northwest Arkansas self-reported seeing a fireball in the northern evening sky Thursday evening.
According to AMSMeteors.org, 20 reports about a fireball seen over Arkansas, Illinois, Missouri, and Oklahoma on Thursday, October 17th, 2019 around 8:21 p.m. CT.
Steve Arnold of Eureka Springs is a professional meteorite hunter who hosted 'Meteorite Men' a TV series for 3 seasons on Science and Discovery channel. Arnold has been fireball chasing for 27 years. He travels, often on very short notice, to chase fireballs all over the country.
Video footage from AMS members 'Marco H' and 'Christophe F':
The NASA video showed the object streaking across the night's sky before producing a flash which outshone the Moon.
NASA has traced the meteor back to the Big Dipper constellation, which allowed the space agency to confidently state it is part of the October Ursae Majorids shower.
The meteor shower peaks during mid-October, and on clear nights one fireball can be seen per hour on average.
No debris from the meteor has yet been discovered on the ground.
The fireball appeared to have been visible mostly to those living in Central and Northern Trinidad and a number of people yesterday posted video clips of the celestial activity, accompanied by exclamations of wonder.
According to the Trinidad and Tobago Weather Centre, most people said the event took place between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.
One video, recorded from a vehicle, also showed two smaller, round lights that at first appeared to be following the meteor, but many surmised that these were generated by the lens of the camera.
While "shooting stars" are commonly spotted, they are usually much smaller and burn up quickly.
The much larger object making its way across the local sky elicited a variety of comments.
Some were extremely pleased at the opportunity, while others joked that the object may have been the reviled "soucouyant" of local lore, an alleged vampire fabled to be an older woman who sheds her skin at night to stalk her victims.
SMART project detectors at the Calar Alto observatory in the Filabres mountains and at observatories in the Sierra Nevada and Seville captured stunning images of the fireball as it made its way across the night sky at 3.44 am on October 13 at an altitude of some 95 kilometres.
Meteoroides.net explained on social media that the "beautiful and slow" fireball originated from a rock from a comet entering the earth's atmosphere at a speed of around 58,000 kilometres per hour.
Asteroid 2019 SR8 is considered a 'near-Earth object' or NEO by NASA, and whizzed past us at a distance of over 3 million miles around 03:45 BST Wednesday. SR8 measures between 65 and 144 feet in diameter (20 and 44 meters).
For comparison, Rome's Colosseum is 157 feet (48 meters) tall and the leaning tower of Pisa measures some 183 feet (56 meters) tall. The flyby fun doesn't stop today though.
Comment: Clearly, there are far more asteroids/comets in the inner solar system these days. This is obviously connected with why meteor fireball events have gone way up. And yet the media still refuses to touch this story!
What's it gonna take people? Kersplat??
Just last week, there were SIXTEEN fly-bys of NEOs:
Asteroid swarm: SEVEN asteroids to zoom past Earth today! NINE more later this week...
Incoming! ANOTHER asteroid - discovered just today - to make fly-by this week

A meteor lights up the midnight sky over the northeastern China provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang in this dashcam and surveillance camera video views taken on Oct. 11, 2019.
What appears to be a dazzling meteor lit up the sky over northeast China on Friday (Oct. 11), appearing as a brilliant fireball in surveillance videos of the event.
The meteor occurred at about 12:16 a.m. Beijing Time, turning night into day and casting dark shadows as it streaked through the sky, according to the state-run CCTV. Videos of the fireball were captured by surveillance cameras in the city of Songyuan in the province of Jilin, as well as by many residents across northeast China, CCTV reported.
First spotted by astronomers only earlier this week, the asteroid dubbed 2019 TA7 is set to fly by Earth at a speed of over 22,500 miles per hour at 6:53pm ET on Monday, data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reveals.
The new celestial visitor is estimated to measure up to 111 feet in diameter and is among a group of recently discovered asteroids that have been traveling close to Earth in recent days.
The American Meteor Society says it received more than 130 reports about the fireball, seen over Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
It was likely a product of the South Taurid meteor shower.
The shower is caused by leftover debris from Comet Encke. It's not very active, you're lucky to see five to seven meteors an hour at its peak, but it is known to produce fireballs.
Comment: On October 5th, the American Meteor Society received 119 reports of a meteor over the southeastern US.
We received 119 reports about a fireball seen over AL, FL, GA, NC, SC and TN on Saturday, October 5th 2019 around 10:26 UT.AMS member Salvatore T. caught the fireball on his doorbell camera:














Comment: Just a few days before, a fireball was widely reported over France.