The great ball of fire that blazed across the skies of Northern California was caught on camera — an astonishing sight that occurred just hours after another meteor sent shock waves over Russia and injured hundreds.
A car dash cam video uploaded to YouTube on Friday shows a falling light in the sky at 7:44 p.m. The footage says the driver was headed southbound on Interstate 280 in the San Francisco Bay Area .
The fireball was also reported around Sacramento and along the California coast, according to NBC affiliate KSBW-TV in Salinas.
“It was a bright green when it first appeared, then it went to a bright yellow. It was awesome!” witness Candice Guruwaiya wrote to NBCBayArea.com on Facebook.
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No one was reportedly hurt from the event, which astronomer Gerald McKeegan told NBC appeared to be a “sporadic meteor.”
The meteors cause space debris in the form of rock and metal, but they typically burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere before they can cause significant damage on the ground. And most of the time they go unnoticed because they occur over the ocean,
“Usually these things break up into small pieces and are difficult to find,” said McKeegan, of the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland.
The celestial sighting over California follows another one in October, when Bay Area residents reported seeing a meteor and hearing a loud sonic boom — the result of the object traveling faster than the speed of sound.
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Also on Friday, a 150-foot asteroid whizzed past Earth within 17,000 miles — enough of a distance to safely pass the planet. Still, it was a lot closer than some satellites.
The day's cosmic curiosities, however, are simply coincidences, astronomers said.
The type of meteor that streaked over Chelyabinsk, Russia, is rarely felt: It was estimated at 55 feet across before it entered the Earth’s atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.
NASA said it was 30 times the size of the nuclear bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.
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“We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average,” said Paul Chodas of NASA’s Near-Earth Object program in Pasadena, Calif.
The meteor injured more than 1,200 people, who were mostly hurt by falling glass from blown-out windows. About 40 people remain hospitalized.
A massive cleanup effort began over the weekend, and city officials claimed Sunday that about 60% of the broken windows have been replaced.
The damage is estimated at about $30 million, officials said.
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Meanwhile, pieces of the meteor are believed to have fallen into an ice-covered lake about 50 miles outside the city, but no fragments were found over the weekend.
The incident has also prompted Russian astronomers and officials to call for the creation of a space monitoring and warning system — one that could help prevent further damage and injuries in the future.
The world's developed nations should "unite in creating a system of warning," said Vladimir Lipunov, of the Space Monitoring Laboratory at Moscow State University.
With News Wire Services
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