The NASA Meteor Watch Facebook page said the fireball first became visible as it entered the atmosphere about 47 miles above Forest Hill, Md., near the state’s northeastern corner, and was sweeping to the northwest at 36,000 mph. “It disintegrated at an altitude of 22 miles above the Gnatstown in Pennsylvania, having achieved a brightness equal to that of a quarter Moon and traveling just over 55 miles through the atmosphere,” the page said.
Dozens of Capital Weather Gang social media account followers said they witnessed the spectacle.
Travis Hare described it on X as “an absolutely amazing green fireball sparking through the eastern sky!”
“I saw it in Metuchen, New Jersey. It was bright green! One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen,” tweeted Collin Gross.
“What was amazing is how bright it was,” tweeted @jesse_agan, who saw the fireball in Chantilly, Va.
Check out this bright and beautiful meteor streaking through the sky in Goshen, NJ (just north of Cap May) last night. Werner Tedesco (visits Myrtle Beach often) just happened to be doing some nighttime photography with sunflowers when he captured this. So awesome Werner! pic.twitter.com/CpXxTEiBly
— Ed Piotrowski (@EdPiotrowski) September 4, 2023
As the meteor passed through the atmosphere, it appeared to burn up — emitting a glowing, bright light before it developed a green tail.
Based on video of the event, the fireball probably became a bolide, which is “a special type of fireball which explodes in a bright terminal flash at its end, often with visible fragmentation,” according to the American Meteor Society.
#Meteor/ Bolide (exploding) Videos (many) Sunday Night Sep 3 2023
#Starlink deployment overhead was coincidental and the reason many had taken video.
Collection of clips around central Maryland
9:23 PM (average) with sound a few min later. @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/6EGNEl4wJj— Justin Berk (@JustinWeather) September 4, 2023
The American Meteor Society, which encourages eyewitnesses to post reports of meteors on its website, also received dozens of reports, the bulk of them from Maryland and Pennsylvania but also several from D.C., Virginia, New Jersey and New York.
Many eyewitnesses said the fireball passed silently, but others said they heard a boom.
The sightings in the Mid-Atlantic come just a day after a fireball awed sky watchers in Erzurum, Turkey, the scene of this video:
Fireballs dash across the sky every day in different parts of the world, many over the ocean, where they are never seen. Sunday night’s fireball in the Mid-Atlantic is not an uncommon event; they’ve been spotted in the D.C. sky many times before.
“Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth’s atmosphere each day. The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight,” the American Meteor Society explains. “Those that occur at night also stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them.”
In the D.C. area, the meteor came at the end of a sultry day in which high temperatures reached the upper 90s. Washington Dulles International Airport reached 99 degrees, matching its highest temperature ever observed in September. Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport hit 98 degrees, a calendar-day record. Reagan National Airport soared to 97 degrees, just one degree shy of the calendar-day record.
Monday is forecast to be just as hot.
