An extremely bright meteor lit up the night sky above southeastern Michigan on January 16th, 2018, and thanks to all the dashcams and doorbell cams out there this freaky astronomical event was caught on video.
Here's dashcam footage of the meteor from Jalopnik reader Mike Austin:
NASA has since confirmed that it was actually a meteorite, more specifically a small asteroid that burned up as it entered our atmosphere:
NASA officials had a simple explanation, saying a meteoroid entered Earth’s atmosphere about 8:08 p.m.
“It was definitely a meteor,” Bill Cooke, lead for NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, told The Washington Post.
Cooke said the fireball was caused by a small asteroid about one to two yards in diameter, moving at 28,000 mph. When it entered into the atmosphere, he said, it heated up and began to melt away, producing the bright light that people saw.
Here's how it looked to Dan McGhee from Ypsilanti's doorbell camera:
Like a flare made of space stuff...freaky!
-Via Jalopnik