The Big Western Fireball

I was up at Mount Lemmon watching the Leonids Tuesday night/Wednesday morning (since the peak was right in the middle of the day U.S. time, some places such as Mount Lemmon did their observing Tuesday night). It was an okay display with bit of an uptick in activity a little after midnight as was predicted as Earth passed through a denser stream of material.

One fireball stood out, however. Low in the north, this spectacular meteor lit up the sky and made the landscape easily visible for a few seconds.

Turns out this one caused quite the stir a little farther north up in Utah. It hit there at 12:07am (agreeing with the time we saw it) and caused quite a few 911 calls.

Spaceweather.com has a lot of pictures and videos of it as does ksl.com. Turns out this was not a Leonid but just happned to hit Earth at the same time as the annual shower.

The story may not be quite done yet. This meteor may have small pieces that reached the ground...possibly ranging from gravel to softball size would be the best guess. Keep a lookout for reports of people finding pieces.

Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.