Bright ‘fireball’ meteor spotted crashing off the East Coast

The American Meteor Society says that over 400 people in 11 states, including here in New Jersey, reported spotting the meteor, which is believed to have crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Virginia.

New 12 New Jersey Assistant News Director Jeremy Settle’s Nest camera caught the meteor as it streaked across the sky around 6:30 a.m. in a video that has now gone viral.

“This one happened to be in the right time, over the right location,” says Raritan Valley Community College Planetarium Director Amie Gallagher. “We’re a fairly populated area from New York to North Carolina.

Gallagher says that one does not have to rely on surveillance cameras to see these types of events. She says that people just need to look up.

“We are always looking down, just not focused on sky like our ancestors used to be,” she says “They probably saw more. You just have to look up to see these things."

Gallagher says that meteors and fireballs both occur in our atmosphere daily. But she says that they often fly through areas above the ocean or in uninhabited areas. She say that she hopes that Wednesday’s well-seen meteor event gets more people interested in space.

“It’s really exciting that so many got to see it and so many reports and I hope it encourages more people to look up at sky…The sky is so exciting There's always something up there happening up there,” she says.

The American Meteor Society says that several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude happen in the Earth's atmosphere each day. They encourage anyone who sees any kind of meteor to report it at their website.