Granite State Times

The skies have been active in the Granite State this month, with several meteor showers occurring, and a Pelham police officer’s dashboard camera recently caught a bright fireball streaking across the early-morning sky.

WMUR9 reported that on Oct. 6 at 12:45 a.m., a bright light believed to be a meteor, was spotted by several New Hampshire residents. 

The American Meteor Society received 20 reports from each New England state. According to WMUR9, reports show that the fireball is thought to have been first seen above Taunton, Massachusetts, and traveled south off the coast of Rhode Island.

The spectacle was not only caught on film by the police dashcam but was also filmed by a resident of Holbrook, Massachusetts, on a surveillance camera.

Fireballs have been known to shine brighter than Venus and often coincide with meteor showers. The Draconid meteor shower peaked just two days after the meteor fireball was viewed. 

New England may have had another meteor enter the atmosphere in recent days as well. On Oct. 10, residents in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine reported a loud noise and the ground shaking at 11:30 a.m. While the cause is still unclear, several meteorologists have said they believe it was caused by a sonic boom from a meteor exploding into the atmosphere. There were reports of the sound from more than 40 communities.

“The Earth is always passing through this sort of dust of sporadic meteoroids,” Ryan Volz, research scientist a the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told WMUR9. “And mostly, they’re very small, dust-sized particles, and they’re creating meteor events that no one notices, except scientists who try and look for them. But sometimes you get these bigger meteoroids, and they create something that everybody notices.”