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Meteor reports stream in after a huge fireball is sighted in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware and Pennsylvania.
Reports came in fast and furious to the American Meteor Society’s “Fireball Page,” which tracks citizen sightings of meteors.
Many of the reports read like this one from Peter in Chester: “It was the brightest I’ve ever seen. I even heard a boom.”
“A meteriod is a small piece of rock or ice that’s floating around in space and collides with Earth’s atmosphere. When that happens, this light effect takes place. A fireball comes down. People see it and most of the time, 99.9 percent of the time, it just evaporates or vaporizes in the atmosphere,” said Michael Hankey, of the American Meteor Society.
Dan Perjar, a software developer at N.C. State University, said he caught footage of a meteor on his dash cam and then posted it to YouTube. Perjar said he was driving on Interstate-440 heading from Cary to N.C. State when he saw it.
“Just a normal nighttime drive and I saw this, looked like a firework initially, shooting really kind of flat. It wasn’t really coming down. It looked like it was just going across,” said Perjar.
The video has been picked up by news outlets and websites all over the country.
Already more than 100 people have reported seeing it, from New Jersey all the way down to North Carolina, allowing experts to pin-point its location to Virginia.
“As it’s coming down, the light that surrounds it is enormous and most witnesses think that it’s happening, like, in their back yard. but the reality is it’s very far away,” said Hankey.
Experts say even though there are multiple fireballs in the sky every day, the average person is lucky to see even a single one in their lifetime.
Agencies/Canadajournal
