Hanukkah evening meteor in the south sky of of Santa Fe, December 6 2015 at 7:34PM.

The meteor comes from the east at about 25 second mark.


I was driving southbound at https://goo.gl/maps/zqjSYkayet32 .

The fireball was brilliant white and the dashcam doesn't do it justice.

The rumble you hear is the sound of a diesel Vanagon.

Fireball -- 04/12/2015 - Estação DOG/DF - Paulo Cacella

It was more a matter of luck than anything else, but it was an amazing 1-2 seconds caught live on television Sunday morning at about 8:17 a.m. A fireball raced across the deep blue sky over Providence, and I watched it as it happened. Look just above the smoke stack about 3 seconds into the video.

To see the fireball, enlarge the video to fill your screen.

Our Hurricane Barrier Cam was pointed to the west. For perspective, the I-Way Bridge is on the right, Rhode Island and Hasbro Children's Hospitals are in the center of the screen. I circled the streak of light in red below. You can see it behind the exhaust from the smoke stack. In the inset, you can see the pieces of the burning debris that fell off of the object.

Fireball recorded on 5 Dec. 2015 at 21:43 UT in the framework of the SMART Project (www.meteoroides.net). The bolide penetrated the atmosphere till an ending height of about 18 km. A small fraction of the meteoroid survived, and the resulting meteorite fell into the Mediterranean Sea.

Did you see a meteor in the skies above Cheltenham last night?

They were caught on camera by Allan Carter who posted the images on twitter this morning.

He wrote: "Caught this bright meteor breaking through the clouds on two cameras to the north East over Cheltenham area."

A very bright bolide appeared on Nov. 28th, 2015 at 19h07m08s TUC was recorded by Folgueroles SPMN station operated by Pep Pujols (Agrupació Astronòmica d'Osona). Trajectory reconstruction from other 4 stations was made by Dr. J.M. Trigo-Rodriguez (CSIC-IEEC) giving clues on the fragile nature of the meteoroid producing this bright fireball that disrupted abruptly at a height of 80 km. More details in Dec. 4th, 2015 IEEC press release

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.

Geminids meteors are beginning to fly. The shower peaks on the night of December 13.

Our friend Eliot Herman - who has a very cool set-up for capturing meteors - sent us this photo. It appears to be an early Geminid meteor, and not just any meteor but a fireball, or exceptionally bright meteor. We're still many days away from the peak of this shower on the night of December 13 (morning of December 14), 2015. But the shower should be gearing up around now. Eliot wrote:

Fisheyes curve, or distort, so one needs to be a bit careful about projecting back [to the radiant point], but it looks like the right place.

He's talking about the fact that meteors in annual showers, like the Geminids, all appear to stream in our sky from a single point, called the radiant point. You don't have to be looking at the radiant point to see the meteor shower, but - to see the greatest number of meteors - it's better if the radiant point is above the horizon, and best if it's high in the sky. For the Geminids, the highest point in the sky is around 2 a.m. local time. That's the time on your clock no matter where you are on Earth.

Thanks, Eliot!

A mysterious fireball set social media ablaze as hundreds took to Twitter to report a bright object falling from the sky.
Shortly after 10pm on Sunday night the first queries started popping up on the internet with some speculation about what the fiery sphere was.

@xBobbyJean was one of the first to Tweet, saying: "Just saw what seemed to be a fireball travelling southwards across the sky - odd! Did anyone else see it? #Belfast.

Many were quick to joke of an alien invasion of a foreign military attack but others realised they had witnessed a spectacular meteor, according to Tolis Christou from the Armagh Observatory. "Judging from its brightness, I would say it was a chunk of rock, about the size of a grapefruit, independently orbiting the Sun until it had a misfortune of coming across our planet", he said.

"Upon entering the atmosphere, friction - air molecules bouncing off it - caused it to heat up and glow. This light that we see from the ground is what we call a meteor. Eventually, the intense heat caused it to vaporise completely before reaching the ground. "It appeared to emanate from the vicinity of the constellations Draco the Dragon and Ursa Major (Big Dipper). If we were to stay up all night every night, we would expect to see one as bright as that every month approximately. The casual observer would probably see one every year."

Mr Christou said that by judging from its apparent path across the sky, this event was not related to the Lyrid meteor shower which peaked on April 22/23. At peak activity this shower produces 15 or 20 meteors per hour. Reports of the fireball weren't limited to Northern Ireland, as residents of Dublin, Galway and others in Scotland shared their visual experiences.

What was this mysterious green light striking the sky of South Africa on November 28, 2015?

The strange green light was spotted by hundreds of baffled residents from Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg...

seems legit or its vfx 50/50 "@LiveMagSA WHAT WAS THAT? Anyone else see that green light flying over Soweto? #UFOSA pic.twitter.com/pZyl60dj7L"

— PhetogoTshepoMahasha (@PTMahasha) November 30, 2015

Hundreds of people reported through social networks a strange green light in the sky over Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg at around 11pm on November 28, 2015.