Fireball streaks across Carolinas nighttime sky, video shows. ‘It was so quick.’
From the mountains to the coast, Carolinians reported a fireball in the night sky on Saturday, including Raleigh and Charlotte.
Tiffany Nash Effinger of Bakersville in the N.C. mountains provided a photo and five-second video of the mysterious streaking fireball to the American Meteor Society.
The society received a total of 17 reports of the fireball from people in the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia.
“It might’ve had a trail but it was so quick,” a woman from Wendell east of Raleigh reported.
“It was very bright,” a Fort Mill woman said. “The center was glowing white.”
The fireball had a “trail of bright light, green light,” a woman from Nebo in the mountains said.
A Virginia man said the fireball was orange and yellow, “very large,” and “looked like it was going to hit the ground.”
A man in Galax, Virginia, said he, too, was spooked. “It was significant size and flash in the sky,” he said. “Worried me for a few minutes.”
On Jan. 30, at least 19 people from the Carolinas, Virginia and Maryland reported seeing a mysterious fireball in the night sky, according to the society.
They included a Lake Norman man who reported seeing the fireball darting “from up right to down left” in the skies above Cornelius for 1.5 seconds at 8:46 p.m., according to the man’s report on the society’s website.
The society encourages people to report anything they see that’s “bright and fast” in the sky and may look like a shooting star. “Report it: it may be a fireball,” society officials say.
Filing a report is important because it alerts the society “to potentially scientifically significant events that occur, and contributes to the general database of knowledge about meteors.”