I love how ‘instant’ everything is these days.
That includes the ability of so many to instantly share the fact they just saw a bright light in the sky!
Tonight, not long after 8 o’clock, we got a smattering of phone calls into the KOIN Local 6 Newsroomand some people were talking about it on Twitter and Facebook. I’m pretty sure it would have been much crazier if patchy high clouds weren’t cruising through–this must’ve blocked the view for a whole lot of people.
NASA estimates about 200,000 pounds of space dust, sand and rock slams earth’s atmosphere each and every day. But only bigger pieces of this debris, say baseball to basketball size, burn bright enough to be considered a fireball meteor. These burn up as they hit the edge of our skies at about 35,000 miles an hour!
Portland meteor expert Dick Pugh says these sorts of fireballs burn up in skies around the world every single day–but for the reasons listed in the graphic, most go unseen or un-noticed.
And he also says this fireball meteor was likely too small to survive all the way to earth and probably burned up long before it had a chance to hit the ground.
If you saw tonight’s fireball, I’m jealous.
Because I’ve only seen one in my life. I was in Beaverton on the peak night of the Perseid meteor showers back in 2000 and was looking out the window for ‘just one more’ before going to bed. And boom! All of a sudden a bright fireball meteor streaked straight ahead and lasted at least a couple of seconds. As I write this…I can still picture exactly what it looked like…
What a great sight it was last night! It had such great blue and green colors. Also was bright, dimmed and then became bright again before it went over the horizon. Thanks for the update Bruce!
Ryan–glad you got to see it. Thanks for your ‘fireball report’!
Just shortly after eight pm, my daughter and I were camping on a peak close to Lost Lake in the Coast range when we saw the fireball come down out of the sky. It was to the NW of our location which I reported to the Authorities. They were taking reports from other sources that had seen it as well. It lasted about eight seconds before it finally disappeared on the other side of the ridge. What a sight!
have u seen the large objects in the sky they look like a flying football stadium flashing bright lights blue green and red they accompany the fireballs email me if you or anyone else saw these two objects on 9/22/2014