As a keen amateur astronomer, I have never witnessed anything of this brightness before. I would liken it to a slow motion meteor. The gif image below is about the same elapsed time of my sighting.
The brightness of this fireball meteor gives it the potential of attaining meteorite status.
These extracts courtesy of the American Meteor Society (founded 1911):
Generally speaking, a fireball must be greater than about magnitude -8 to -10 in order to potentially produce a meteorite fall. Two important additional requirements are that (1) the parent meteoroid must be of asteroidal origin, composed of sufficiently sturdy material for the trip through the atmosphere, and (2) the meteoroid must enter the atmosphere as a relatively slow meteor. Meteoroids of asteroid origin make up only a small percentage (about 5%) of the overall meteoroid population, which is primarily cometary in nature.
An example of a fireball meteor (courtesy of NASA/George Varros) |
FREQUENCY OF FIREBALLS
Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth’s atmosphere each day. The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight. Those that occur at night also stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them.
Additionally, the brighter the fireball, the more rare is the event. As a general thumb rule, there are only about 1/3 as many fireballs present for each successively brighter magnitude class, following an exponential decrease. Experienced observers can expect to see only about 1 fireball of magnitude -6 or better for every 200 hours of meteor observing, while a fireball of magnitude -4 can be expected about once every 20 hours or so.
The next two nights will see the onset of the Lyrid meteor showers which may be spectacular this year.
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