MISSOULA — Did you see it? Lots of people across Montana saw a bright light streaking across the sky on Wednesday morning.
The National Weather Service office in Missoula reports a sensor detected what appears to be a meteor at around 6:30 a.m.
The meteor was first detected over southwest Alberta.
The American Meteor Society (AMS) says it has received hundreds of reports from people in Montana, Idaho, Washington, North Dakota, Oregon, and Western Canada.
According to the AMS, 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 in the morning or evening sky.
A bolide is a special type of fireball which explodes in a bright terminal flash at its end, often with visible fragmentation.
The organization says that 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. Those that occur at night also stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them."
A similar incident happened back in May 2024:
It appears the GLM(Geostationary Lightning Mapper) #GOES18 sensor picked up a meteorite signature around 1331 UTC (6:31 AM MST) this morning, located over southwestern Alberta. There are multiple reports of the sky lighting up across western Montana. GLM is parallax-corrected. pic.twitter.com/zMYmmI2852
— NWS Missoula (@NWSMissoula) November 13, 2024
