The night sky lit up on Wednesday, December 4th, 2019 with a blazing fireball streaking across Alabama in footage captured by multiple agencies.
The National Weather Service out of Birmingham tweeted out a video of a massive meteor flying past one of its skycam locations around 7:25 pm on Wednesday.
“We’ve received reports of a vivid and long-lasting meteor/fireball . Well, we caught it on our skycam! The video begins at about 7:25 PM,” they wrote in the tweet.
In a report from Storyful on Yahoo! News, Dr. Bill Cooke from NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office explained that the different visual cues from the meteor reveal that it is likely the result of a fragment of an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere. From the data, it’s estimated that the fragment was four inches in diameter and weighed around 3 lbs.
Notably, the Geminid Meteor Shower is set to peak over the world on the mornings of December 13th and 14th, 2019 – and should be quite the sight!
Check out this video below of this recent fireball across the Alabama sky and see another video of one from 2018!
☄️We've received reports of a vivid and long-lasting meteor/fire ball . Well, we caught it on our skycam! The video begins at about 7:25 PM. pic.twitter.com/r0nHZSvMGg
— NWS Birmingham (@NWSBirmingham) December 5, 2019