Fireball lights up skies above New England

If you saw a spectacular flash of light in the sky the other night, you weren’t alone.

Hundreds of people across New England and southern Canada reported seeing a huge fireball around 12:50 a.m. Tuesday.

According to researchers at the American Meteor Society, which tracks these larger-than-normal meteors, there were nearly 700 reports from witnesses in nine states, including Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, as well as the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Québec.

The meteoric event was captured in several videos, including a pair from police dash cameras in two states — one in Plattsburgh, N.Y., the other in Portland, Me.

Based on still footage from Vermont’s Burlington International Airport, it appears that the meteoroid split in two before entering Earth’s atmosphere.

Fireballs are not uncommon (several thousand occur each day, though most go unseen) and are usually the byproduct of a very bright meteor shower or some related astrological event.

But not always. In February, a fireball spotted streaking across the night in the western U.S. was almost certainly “the body of a rocket used by China in December to launch a satellite,” Reuters reported.

In that case, witnesses in several Rocky Mountain states “reported seeing the rocket as it disintegrated in the atmosphere about 70 miles above Earth.”

Chris Anderson, manager of the Centennial Observatory at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls, told the news service that fellow “space junk” trackers had predicted the rocket’s re-entry would be seen in northern Russia.

“It’s devilishly difficult to predict exactly when things will come down and where because it depends so much on the atmospheric drag and the orientation of the object as it plows through the air,” Anderson told the news service.