Last Saturday, amateur astronomers around the world brought out their telescopes and showed views of the Moon, Venus, Saturn and other celestial objects to the general public. The first video we received was from our astronomer friends in Byron Bay, Australia.  They submitted their video on-line to AstroShorts.com.

My good friend Casey and I made the journey to Suffern, New York to check out NEAF, the NorthEAst Astronomy Forum.

Here’s our report as posted on AstroShorts.com

Stock Photo Credit:  Nasa

Sunday March 11th at about 8 PM -People throughout the GTA witnessed a fireball moving across our sky towards the west.  Police switchboards from the Regions of Durham, York and Toronto started to receive the calls of the curious and the concerned.  Was it a plane in distress?  A meteor shower?  A UFO?  Maybe even “space junk” such as a spent rocket booster finally making it back to Earth after years in orbit.

What people likely saw was the blazing trail of a little rock burning up in our upper atmosphere as it traversed the sky.  Usually with such events, it’s unlikely that anything actually makes it to the ground.

What’s happening here?  In a word -compression.  As the object enters the atmosphere, it compresses the air in front of it.  The air heats up to extremely high temperatures, consuming the unfortunate object in the process.  You can experience something similar -on a smaller scale of course- when you pump up a bicycle tire with a manual air pump.  The pump gets hotter and hotter as you compress the air in the tire to a higher pressure.

Will we find any physical evidence of last night’s sky show?  Not likely but if we do, I’ll keep you posted.