Event: 20241021-230002

Hundreds of eyewitnesses in the states of Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia and the Canadian province of Ontario have filed reports on the American Meteor Society website of a bright fireball seen at 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, October 21. The event was also captured by several cameras belonging to the Southern Ontario Meteor Network and the NASA Fireball Network, as well as some publicly accessible cameras as far away as Cincinnati. Analysis of the available data places first visibility of the meteor at an altitude of 40 miles above the Lake Erie shoreline near Willoughby, Ohio, moving a little north of East at a slow (for a meteor) 45,000 miles per hour. It traveled nearly parallel to the Lake Erie shore for some 39 miles before disintegrating 22 miles above the water near Ashtabula. The orbit and light curve information suggest that this fireball was produced by a fragment of an asteroid weighing about 2 pounds and having a diameter of approximately 4 inches. It is not associated with the currently active Orionid meteor shower.
We thank the American Meteor Society for providing the eyewitness reports.

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Images and Video from NASA and Western University's Southern Ontario Meteor Network

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Event Data