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Mysterious Light in Colorado Sky Explained
posted by: Jeffrey Wolf updated by: Dan Boniface and Heidi McGuire
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Oct. 29, 2008
DENVER - Many of you called and wrote in about a bright light shooting across the sky around 7:30 Tuesday night.
Jason Harris was one of them. He was finishing up dinner at his parents' Highlands Ranch home when he ran out to get something from his car and saw it.
"About 10 feet above the house in front of me there was this huge burst it looked like a bottle rocket or something shooting across the sky," he said.
Local astronomer Chris Peterson works at the Cloudbait Observatory in Guffey, Colo., and says what Peterson witnessed was a fireball.
A fireball is a large meteor that is brighter than Venus.
Several cameras in the Colorado AllSky Camera Network captured the image of the fireball crossing the sky Tuesday night.
"What most people saw was a really bright light going across the sky, if they were in the Denver area they generally saw it in the south moving east to west," said Peterson.
Peterson estimates the fireball was the size of a basketball when it entered earth's atmosphere, and was traveling thousands of miles per hour as it disintegrated over the Western Slope.
"Imagine an ice cube and blow torch, the outside of it burns away while the inside is still cold. While it traveled across Colorado, it got smaller and smaller as it was burned away," said Peterson.
The fireball didn't reach Earth's surface. Peterson said it probably burned down 30 to 40 miles away.
"It was amazing, it was gorgeous," Harris said of what he saw.
It only lasted a few seconds.
"Most people never end up seeing anything quite this spectacular and because of that, the people who do see fireballs like this, they really remember it for their whole life," Peterson said.
Peterson would like to hear from you if you saw the fireball Tuesday night. Visit http://www.cloudbait.com/science/fireballs.html.
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