JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Most of us slept through an amazing celestial show early Thursday morning, a fireball lit up the sky from South Carolina to Tampa. Calls poured into our newsroom asking about the fireball.
According to the American Meteor Society’s website, a fireball is another term for a very bright meteor, generally brighter than magnitude -4, which is about the same magnitude of the planet Venus as seen in the morning or evening sky. A bolide is a special type of fireball that explodes in a bright terminal flash at its end, often with visible fragmentation.
The fireball was caught on the ring doorbell camera of a News4Jax viewer about 12:45 a.m. From the videos we’ve seen it looks like this fireball was in fact a bolide, with the bright terminal flash at the end.
On The Morning Show Thursday, we talked to Mike Hankey with the American Meteor Society about the event. He said the color of the meteor could tell us more about where it came from.
You can look at all of the reports of the fireball, by clicking here.
Among the reports there are two videos of the fireball, check out this one uploaded by Joseph G.