Whereas most Alaskans have been tucked up in mattress early on Wednesday morning, various residence safety cameras in and round Anchorage captured a pure phenomenon that may in any other case have gone largely unnoticed.
At round 5:45 a.m. native time, a meteor hurtled throughout the sky, its pace because it hit Earth’s environment inflicting a brilliant gentle that momentarily lit up a big portion of Southcentral Alaska.
In footage captured by a resident’s doorcam and shared by Reuters, we are able to clearly see the meteor blaze throughout the sky above Anchorage.
However not everybody was sleeping, with some people witnessing the occasion from their car earlier than reporting it on the American Meteor Society’s web site.
“Noticed this from the automotive driving north on Boniface Parkway in Anchorage,” wrote one witness. “I’ve seen meteor showers previously, and this was not like something I’d ever seen … the streak was a lot, a lot wider, not like the skinny traces of capturing stars or meteor showers. I had two folks within the automotive with me who additionally noticed it, one among whom has a private curiosity in astronomy, and he or she agreed she had by no means seen something prefer it.”
One other wrote: “I used to be driving my automotive when the intense gentle got here behind me and lit up the sky after which it got here excessive of my automotive after which in entrance of my imaginative and prescient after which disappeared out of the blue. Vivid white on the entrance with a brilliant blue tail.”
Mark Conde, a physics professor on the College of Alaska Fairbanks, advised an area information web site that the occasion was most likely part of the Ursid meteor bathe, originating from comet 8P/Tuttle.
The truth is, Thursday evening is a superb evening to stay your head out of the window, or make you strategy to a location free from gentle air pollution, to see if you happen to can spot any capturing stars from the Ursids, as this 12 months’s bathe is about to peak. EarthSky suggests chances are you’ll be fortunate sufficient to see as much as 10 meteors per hour, however they’re unlikely to be as huge because the one noticed over Alaska on Wednesday.
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