Fireball in the sky over Saskatchewan, Canada!

A brilliant green fireball startled onlookers across western Canada on Nov. 20th (5:30 pm MST) when it split the evening sky and fragmented during a series of thunderous explosions. "The sky was lit up almost like daytime for 3 or 4 seconds," reports Gordon Blomgren of Alberta. Murray McDonnell of northwestern Saskatchewan says "my wife and I saw a brilliant flash of blue white light, like lightning. About one minute later a long rumbling sound shook the house."

Andy Bartlett video-recorded the event from a 10th-floor apartment in Edmonton, Alberta:

www.spaceweather.com...

"The brilliant fireball appeared to be closer than the airplane in the upper right corner of this video," says Bartlett. "I made the movie using a Canon A510."

The nature of the object is uncertain. The slow pace of the fireball favors decaying space junk and, indeed, it may have been a Soyuz rocket body reentering Earth's atmosphere a day earlier than expected. The Soyuz rocket launched a Russian Defense Ministry reconnaissance satellite codenamed Kosmos-2445 on Nov. 14th. We cannot yet rule out the strong possibility that this was a small asteroid disintegrating in Earth's atmosphere; in the statistics of fireballs, asteroids outnumber rocket bodies by a wide margin. Stay tuned for updates.

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[edit on 21-11-2008 by Gemwolf]

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