© NASA , The ProvinceA bolide, or exploding meteor, similar to this one was spotted in the night sky over the Lower Mainland and Western Washington on Friday night.
Tina Robertson was just trying to catch a stray cat out in front of her property when she heard it.
"It freaked me right out," she said.
Then she looked up to see a "big ball of fire."
"It was moving like hell," she said. "It was big, but not as big as that one in Russia."
What she and other witnesses as far afield as Seattle and Nanaimo seem to have seen around 6:50 p.m. Friday night was a type of meteor known as a bolide. Bolides are as bright as a full moon; they're a meteor that doesn't just burn up as it travels through the atmosphere, it explodes.
(Hat tip to Seattle
Twitter user Reb Roush for pointing us all to the term.)
Robertson's partner Wilf Krickhan was loading up fire wood in a bobcat behind the house when he saw the
blue-green bolide flash across the sky.
"It had an orange streak behind it," he said.
The couple live on a farm about 25 kilometres up Chilliwack Lake Road. From their vantage point, it looked like the meteor flashed out up the slopes of Mount McGuire, in direction of Vedder Road and the site of the former CFB Chilliwack.
Friday was the start of the Geminid meteor shower, so keep your eyes peeled at the sky for the next two weeks. The peak period will be on Dec. 13 and 14.
Comment: Yes, the Geminid meteor shower is active at present. But it is well worth remembering what can come out of the sky without any warning at all, such as the Chelyabinsk meteor from February 2013:
For more on the very high probability of Earth soon being on the receiving end of a major cometary bombardment, and why, see Laura Knight-Jadczyk's Comets and Catastrophe series:
and Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection: The Secret History of the World - Book 3 by Pierre Lescaudron
and Laura Knight-Jadczyk