Green East Coast Meteor

Saw a bright green fireball in the sky tonight, low over the northern horizon (as seen from Fairfax) going west to east. I couldn’t get a photo in time, but I sketched it with Paper app on my iPad mini while the image was fresh in my head.

Quick Paper app sketch of East Coast meteor tonight

This fireball was nowhere near the intensity of the Chelyabinsk meteor, but was still high and bright enough to be seen all up and down the east coast. The CapitalWeather story on the event has a couple of videos, and the American Meteor Society’s update has an approximate ground track.

Looks like any fragments from the object probably landed in the Atlantic Ocean. (I wonder if the green color of the fireball was from oxidation of metallic compounds consistent with a spent rocket stage. The west-to-east track might be consistent with the angle of some past low earth orbit launch. This is all speculation, though.)