Fireball Puts On a Colorful Show

A meteoroid so big and bright that it cast shadows like moonlight dazzled observers throughout Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley and regions to the north on Wednesday.

Two astronomers at the Griffith Observatory were among those who spotted the bright fireball at 6:32 p.m. as it dropped out of the northwestern sky toward the ocean before exploding and fizzling out. Callers reported seeing the object from Malibu, Canoga Park and Frazier Park near Gorman.

“It was so spectacular it looked like it wasn’t even real,” said Laurie Hemp, who was in a car with her husband, Bob, traveling west on Roscoe Boulevard at Lindley Avenue. “It was so big and so bright and it fell so fast.”

Hemp said she thought it had crashed into the Simi Hills because she saw “a big flash of light that lit up the sky like lightning.”

But astronomers who saw the phenomena from the observatory parking lot in the Hollywood Hills said the fireball disintegrated over the ocean. Astronomer Patrick So was talking with his colleague Anthony Cook when another witness yelled “Wow!”

So said he spun around in time to see “a bright fireball streaming to the horizon, with a bright yellow head and green halo. As it got into the haze it turned orange and red.”

The astronomer said he knew the fireball had disintegrated in air because it would have caused a sonic boom if it had reached Earth. He said the colors changed as it slowed, much like a piece of heated metal cooling from molten yellow to red hot.

So said most meteors are objects about the size of a grain of sand speeding through space that plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere. But the term fireball is given to larger meteors that are brighter than the brightest planet, Venus. He estimated the size of the meteoroid he saw Wednesday as “larger than a cantaloupe.” He said the bigger the object traveling through the Earth’s atmosphere, the brighter it is.

The spectacle, which lasted two or three seconds, “was a beautiful sight,” So said.

The annual Leonid meteor shower that occurs every year--as the Earth passes through the dusty orbital trail of Comet Tempel-Tuttle--is due to occur Monday or Tuesday, according to astronomers. The meteoroid flash seen Wednesday may have been a precursor of that shower, an astronomy source said.