Fireball Lights Up the Early Morning Sky in Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia
/This article was last updated on February 25.
Did you see the fireball this morning? Capture it on video? If you did you can send in a report to the International Meteor Organization (IMO) or American Meteor Society (AMS). Below is a video that was submitted to the AMS by Marie.
From the following NASA Meteor Watch’s post, the meteor occurred at 6:23 AM (2021 February 22) and was first visible above Skeleton Lake and moved south of west before ablating above Perryvale:
Bright fireball seen over Alberta early this morning (2021 February 22 @ 6:23 AM) There have been over 150 reports of...
Posted by NASA Meteor Watch on Monday, February 22, 2021
Weather satellites that monitor lightning also imaged this meteor because it was so bright:
The Alberta fireball was also imaged from space... It was bright enough to be detected by the Geostationary Lightning Mappers onboard the GOES 16 and 17 weather satellites.
Posted by NASA Meteor Watch on Monday, February 22, 2021
Here is the current map showing the locations of the observers from the event page on the International Meteor Organization website.
There has been enough data to estimate the size, mass and orbit of some recent bright meteors. We will update this article if more information about the meteor becomes available.
Update February 23: There are now 7 videos of the meteor can be found at the IMO event page. Including this one from Mieszko in Edmonton.
Update February 24: AMS has received over 100 videos and 400 reports for this meteor. They produced this fantastic video with music (hint turn on the sound) featuring some of the videos that they received.
Update February 25: University of Alberta researchers were able to calculate the orbit of the meteor. Due to the speed and the orbit they have concluded that the meteor was a fragment of a comet about the size of a grapefruit up to basketball. More details can be found here.
