Fire in the Sky
On the sidewalks, at the stores, at the bars, people have been talking about a loud sound they heard around 2:30 a.m. Saturday. Most have never heard anything like it before.
Life-long Petersburg resident Devren Bennett was asleep at home in Tlingit and Haida Housing Subdivision. Like many others, he was jolted awake.
"I woke up from dead sleep to what sounded like a jet sitting on top of our house with the engine wound up all the way," Bennett said. " First thought was a landslide of some sort but there's no mountains around my house that would cause anything like that, otherwise I had no idea."
"So did you actually feel something?" I asked him.
"Absolutely, you could definitely feel the vibrations," said Bennett.
"The rock fell into the Pacific Ocean, on the border between Panama and Costa Rica, near the Isla Baldones and the town of Puerto Armuelles (Chiriquí)," explained the director of Panama's Sistema Nacional de Protección Civil (Sinaproc), Jose Donderis.
The falling meteorite was spotted by fishing vessel, reporting it to the Sinaproc.
This is the first meteorite to fall in Panama since 2007, when another fell on the town of Farallón, 120 kilometres west of the Panama City, destroying a ranch.
Sources: La Nacion; La Prensa

Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina shows off a compact green coma and two tails in this photo taken this morning (Nov. 22, 2015) at dawn from Arizona. The green color comes from carbon compounds fluorescing in UV sunlight.
"Very difficult observation on this one. (I observed) it visually with the 35mm Panoptic ocular. It was a round, slightly condensed object with no sign of the twin tails that show up in the images. After five minutes, we lost it visually as it was 2° degrees up in bright twilight. Images show it for a longer time and a beautiful emerald green head with two tails forming a Y shaped fan."Schur estimated the comet's brightness at around magnitude +6. What appears to be the dust tail extends to the lower right (southeast) with a narrower ion tail pointing north. With its twin tails, I'm reminded of a soaring eagle or perhaps a turkey vulture rocking back and forth on its wings. While they scavenge for food, Catalina soaks up sunlight.
Cincinnati, Ohio, resident Steve Hart caught a glimpse of a fireball streaking across the night sky earlier this week.
"I installed these security cameras in August, and I've never seen anything like this," Hart wrote on Facebook. "This camera records movement and stores it up to 6 days, and when I saw this, I pulled it off of the DVR and saved it to my computer. I wish I would have been outside to see it!"
The American Meteor Society received around 75 reports of a fireball at about the time Hart captured it on camera, from as far away as Missouri and Kentucky, and as far north as Michigan.
As amazing as it is, it seems like a regular old space rock burning up in Earth's atmosphere -- not like the bizarre phenomenon spotted over southern California earlier in November.
Curious, she went outside to take a look, and it turned out to be more than just a little boy's vivid imagination. A fresh smoke trail from a possible meteorite was clearly visible to the east. Zanotti grabbed her cell phone and started taking pictures.
"I ran outside, and I snap snap snap the trail, but didn't see the fireball," Zanotti recalls.
Nor did she directly observe any impact, as the object landed out of view. Still, she's certain something struck the ground; she's just not sure where.
"It threw up a big cloud of dust," she said. "Was it up past Kneeland, or where was that?"
She then noticed a second set of north-to-south smoke trails in a different location, apparently from more objects headed southbound.
Read more:

A comet fragment skimming Earth’s atmosphere was visible from New Mexico and Colorado on Tuesday evening.
Lamy astronomer Thomas Ashcraft captured the event on his Sentinel camera on loan from Sandia National Laboratories.
Ashcraft said the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., confirmed that the 5:47 p.m. event was the result of a rare Taurid earth-grazer that was about as bright as the first-quarter moon.
"Earth-grazers enter earth's atmosphere at a very shallow angle and skim along the top of the atmosphere. Some actually skim and then re-enter space," Ashcraft wrote in an email. "This fireball was visible for eleven seconds and burned brightly its entire path of at least 180 miles. This means it had some mass to it to be able to burn that long."
Earth-grazers are not rare, but brighter ones, such as Tuesday's fireball, are special, Ashcraft said. "I'm not sure of the last time but I can tell you that a fireball of this size is not a common event over one location," he said. "That it was a long path earth-grazer makes it much more special."

Huge Fireball Meteor Caught on Security Camera somewhere in Midwest and Southern US 19/11/2015
Residents of four US states - Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee - have anxiously reported a loud blast. Their first suggestion was a meteor, but more frightening versions followed.
Some said, though, that they saw the actual meteor, and in some pictures, one can see a bright flash of light in the sky.
@MyGlendale About 20 min ago, heard an explosion, now this? and helicopters...what's going on? pic.twitter.com/hN0bFcm3BU
— Amanda Green (@GreenstheWord) November 20, 2015Comment: Global map of locations where fireballs have been seen so far in 2015:

A bright Taurid meteor falls over Deadfall Basin, near the base of Mount Eddy in California.
But the landscape wasn't the only thing about to explode.
Later that night Brad captured a few "exploding" meteors that produced what are called persistent trains: what remains of a meteor fireball in the upper atmosphere as winds twist and swirl the expanding debris.
Brad created a time-lapse video from the event and slowed down the footage to highlight the trains.












Comment: This youtube video shows a huge fireball meteor caught on Cincinnati resident Steve Hart's home security camera on 19/11/2015.