THUNDER BAY — A Thunder Bay-area resident is waiting to hear back from the American Meteor Society after a fireball streaked through the night sky over the weekend.
Reid Mason, who lives on the Lake Superior shoreline in Shuniah, had his security cameras capture the flaming object just after midnight on Sunday.
"It's pretty obviously a meteor," he said, but added he would like confirmation from experts.
Mason described it as a rare sighting, as even though "everybody's seen 'shooting stars,' they're way up in the sky, usually just little faint dots."
Since his cameras are relatively new, and very sensitive to light, he wonders if they might have accentuated the brightness of the image and made the object appear larger than it would to the naked eye.
But Mason noted that the American Meteor Society has also received a report of a meteor sighting from a person west of Winnipeg at exactly the same time Sunday morning.
"If he saw it all the way in Manitoba, if it was the same one then it was awfully big," he said.
The American Meteor Society is a non-profit scientific organization that was founded in 1911.
It reported last week that March is the slowest month of the year for meteor activity, with no major annual showers taking place this time of year.
According to the National Geographic Society, over the course of an average year, the Earth is hit by about 6,100 meteors large enough to reach the ground, but the vast majority fall unnoticed in uninhabited areas.
