Spectacular meteor falls over Colorado Springs

It was raining fire from the sky above Colorado Springs early Saturday morning, if anyone was looking.

Automated cameras in Guffey, Castle Rock and New Mexico captured a meteor exploding into a massive fireball that was momentarily 100 times as bright as the full moon. Astronomer Chris Peterson, who runs the Cloudbait Observatory in Guffey, said it was the brightest fireball he's captured since setting up the observatory in 2001.

"It just kind of knocked my socks off when I saw this one, because it's probably the brightest one we've ever recorded," Peterson said.

Peterson operates www.cloudbait.com, a Web site where observers can report meteor and fireball sightings. On Monday, he said he was still receiving reports from Denver about a fireball there last week. Saturday's big blast, however, apparently went almost unnoticed, even though it streaked over Colorado Springs from northeast to southwest at about 1 a.m.

"I'm surprised I didn't get reports from inside the town," Peterson said. "It wasn't that late - there must have been people out on the town."
Peterson didn't see the fireball himself. His allsky camera, which records the sky throughout the night, captured the event.

"I would have loved to have seen it," he said. "Luckily, that's what the camera does: It's on all the time."

Fireballs, even big ones, are nothing to freak out about, said Robert Stencel, professor of astronomy at the University of Denver.

"There is a lot of small debris floating around the solar system and the Earth bumps into this stuff more or less all the time," he said. "Autumn and winter are good times for the public to catch these things."

Fragments of the fireball, if anything survived the explosion 54 miles above the Earth, would have fallen between Pueblo and Penrose, Peterson estimates. Some pieces may have even landed on Fort Carson. Finding meteorites in the rocky Rocky Mountains is a needle-in-a-haystack affair, Peterson said, unless someone heard or saw them land.

Nevertheless, he's heard from several meteorite hunters who plan to look for remnants of the blast.

"It's hard to know if anything was produced or not," Peterson said. "That bright burst at the end might have been everything burning up."

Fireballs are defined as meteors that are brighter than the planet Venus. Saturday's fireball was probably caused by a rocky asteroid that was several meters across, said Steve Lee, curator of planetary science at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Fireballs of that size are infrequent but not unheard of, he said.

"They're not entirely rare - it's probably several times a year somewhere on the globe," Lee said. "It's not something that happens every day. I wish I would have seen it. It sounded like a pretty spectacular event."

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CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0275 or awineke@gazette.com


If you saw the blast, send a report at www.cloudbait.com/science/fireballs.html.

Want to go star-watching? Check out the Colorado Springs Astronomical Society at www.csastro.org.