If you were sleepless and staring skyward around in the early hours of Friday morning, you might have spotted a bright spot blazing across the night sky.
If not, don’t worry, the folks at the Mount Washington Observatory have you covered.
At “approximately 3:02 [a.m.] EDT, this video footage was captured by the observatory’s tower camera. What appears to be a fireball, or an especially bright meteor, streaked across the night sky as it moved from south to north,” astronomers posted to the observatory’s Instagram page.
So how common is this kind of sighting?
According to the American Meteor Society, if you’re an experienced observer, you can “expect to see only about 1 fireball of magnitude -6 or better for every 200 hours of meteor observing, while a fireball of magnitude -4 can be expected about once every 20 hours or so.”
And in case you were wondering, “several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth’s atmosphere each day,” according to the society’s website.
“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,” the society noted.
