There were plenty of grey nomads glancing upward last night who would have have been treated to the stunning sight of what is believed to have been a meteor shooting through the skies.
The ‘fireball’ lit up the darkness in South Australia and Victoria … leaving onlookers in awe.
Dylan Bishop captured dashcam footage of a ‘bright white light’ crashing to the ground south of Adelaide just after 10.30pm last night.
And Facebook user Katie Wahlheim said the strange sight had ‘scared the stuffing’ out of her.
“The whole night sky glowed a brilliant orange with what looked like a comet with flames shooting from Earth to the atmosphere,” she said.
Astronomer David Finlay, who administrates the Australia Meteor Report Facebook page, told the ABC that he believed people had seen a small meteor.
“It is pretty obvious that it’s a meteor,” he said. “It’s small asteroid that’s created this and has started to vaporise over the skies of South Australia.”
Many pieces of rock – about 200 tonnes – from space hit Earth every day but most are too small to be noticed. Mr Finlay said there was anecdotal evidence that for the last couple of years the Earth has been bombarded by probably twice as many of these small asteroids than what is normally seen.
The new meteor sighting comes after CCTV captured a meteor shooting over the Northern Territory earlier this week.
Police CCTV vision recorded the meteor shower travelling at high speed across the sky in both Alice Springs and more than 500 kilometres north in Tennant Creek. There were also reports of noise like thunder, rumbling and windows shaking.
