A rare daytime fireball that streaked across the skies over parts of northeastern America Tuesday afternoon was a meteor, NASA said.
More than 200 eyewitness reports were submitted to the American Meteor Society from across Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and Connecticut, helping officials piece together its path.
Using those reports along with data from publicly accessible cameras, analysts determined the meteor first became visible about 48 miles above the Atlantic Ocean near Long Island, NASA said. Traveling southwest at roughly 30,000 miles per hour, it covered about 117 miles before disintegrating roughly 27 miles above Galloway, New Jersey, just north of Atlantic City.
The event unfolded from 2:30 p.m. until 2:45 p.m, according to the American Meteor Society. Most witnesses reported a bright flash above them between 2:35 and 2:40 p.m., with some also seeing multiple green fragments streaking across the sky for several seconds.
In Phillipsburg, New Jersey, one observer, Leslie Galloza, captured an image of the object around 2:34 p.m., and shared it with NBC Philadelphia.
Another New Jersey witness, Nick Brucato, caught the fireball on video and shared it in the public Pine Barrens Facebook Group.
“Here’s what looks like to be the meteor everyone’s talking about. Took this video as fast as I could today in Whiting at 2:34 PM. Heard the loud boom minutes later,” he wrote.
One commenter said they also heard “a very loud boom” in Batsto, while another added that the noise “Startled my dog for a second.”
Additionally, witnesses across Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. also reported meteor sightings.
“It was insanely cool to see,” a resident of Heathsville, Virginia, told NJ.com, adding that the fireball was moving “from up left to down right” and she heard “a muffled boom.”
“The fireball flashed brightly after two to three seconds of watching it streak across the sky from left to right,” a woman from Falls Church, Virginia, also told the outlet. “As the fireball flashed, I saw one or two smaller bright pieces break away before it faded away.”
Meteors are common, but many go unnoticed because they appear over oceans, remote areas, or during daylight, making them difficult to spot. Therefore, widely observed events like Tuesday’s relatively rare, according to NASA.
The latest sighting comes mere weeks after a 7-ton meteorite exploded over Medina County, Ohio, on March 17, creating a sonic boom, followed days later by a separate, unrelated meteor event in Texas.
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