Exploding meteor lights up the night sky in the Pacific Northwest
Tina Robertson was just trying to catch a stray cat in front of her property when she heard it. “It freaked me right out,” she said. Then she looked up to see a “big ball of fire.”
“It was moving like hell. It was big, but not as big as that one in Russia.”
What she and other witnesses as far afield as Seattle and Nanaimo seem to have seen about 6:50 p.m. Friday was a type of meteor known as a bolide.
Bolides are as bright as a full moon; they’re meteors that don’t just burn up as they travel through the atmosphere, they explode.
Robertson’s partner Wilf Krickhan was loading firewood in a bobcat behind the house when he saw the blue-green bolide flash across the sky.
“It had an orange streak behind it,” he said.
The couple lives on a farm about 25 kilometres up Chilliwack Lake Road. From their vantage point, it looked as if the meteor flashed out up the slopes of Mount McGuire, in direction of Vedder Road and the site of the former CFB Chilliwack.
Friday was the start of the Geminid meteor shower, so keep your eyes peeled at the sky for the next two weeks. The peak period will be Dec. 13 and 14.
People in Seattle saw a bright streak in the sky about the same time. So did Andrew Arthur, who was driving southbound through Ladner on Highway 17A.
“It was close — cloud-level almost. Very bright,” he told The Province on Twitter. “Burned up as it travelled southwest.”
Across the Georgia Strait, Marc Kurtagic was out for a stroll when he spotted the bright light in the eastern sky.
“It looked like a distant star at first, then became brighter, then produced a green glow with a bright tail,” he said.
Like Robertson, he was reminded of the famous 2013 bolide, captured by video in Chelyabinsk, Russia, but agreed it was much smaller.
As for Robertson’s stray cat, she still hasn’t caught it.
She and Krickhan said people keep dropping off unwanted pets and they wish the practice would stop.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she said.