A massive fireball lit up skies over Colorado just before dawn on the morning of March 11.
The meteor, flashing a glowing bright green tail, was seen by a vast number of eyewitnesses.
"As it moved towards the far horizon it started to flame out, but even after the tail was gone a bright orange ball was still visible till it disappeared beyond the far mountain range. It was pretty incredible," Greg Moore, an analyst for Weather5280 who witnessed the event, said.
The shooting star was recorded on video by several people, some of whom accidentally captured the event on dashcams.
"The head was bright white, and it had a deep orange tail with what looked like sparks falling behind, moving very slowly for a meteor. I've seen a lot of meteors in my day but this must have been the most spectacular, lasting for what seemed like around 10 seconds," Nate Hershey, a Colorado resident who saw the brilliant fireball, told the press.
Many people who witnessed the dramatic fireball reported what they saw on Twitter.
"Saw the craziest meteor I've ever seen over Denver this morning at 6:00 AM. Must have been visible for at least 8-10 seconds!" Nate Hershey tweeted.
Meteors are seen when space rocks and pebbles fall to Earth, heating up through the action of friction as they pass through the atmosphere. Most of these pieces are about the size of an apple seed, and burn up long before they hit the ground. Some of these objects are large enough to reach the ground, at which point they are classified as meteorites.
Dozens of people sent their stories of seeing the fireball to the American Meteor Society (AMS), which publishes reports of shooting stars witnessed around the country.
One report, from an eyewitness identified only as Mike F, described the fireball as seen from Denver, Colorado. He reported the meteor was seen for roughly 7.5 seconds, as it headed from the upper right quadrant of the sky, down to the lower left. He described the color of the fireball as light green and yellow.
"[I]t had a trail of sparks that were falling rapidly behind it," the eyewitness reported.
Roughly 100 tons of space debris enter the atmosphere of the Earth every day, according to NASA. Surprisingly, astronomers are uncertain where most of this material originates, although some may come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Other debris originates in comets that passed the orbit of the Earth, even thousands of years in the past. Skygazers can witness these events on nearly any clear night, simply by observing the night sky from a location far from city lights.
