Fireball over Colorado captured on my Wyze v3 cam!

Yesterday I saw the best shooting star/fireball of my life, over metropolitan Denver in Colorado , and I was lucky to catch some of it on my Wyze cam! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrwCHgbaYJI&lc=.
It sounds like a lot of people across Colorado saw the same fireball and reports have even come in from Utah and New Mexico - If you’re in the region you might want to check your Playback for Feb 18th at 8:33pm MST. It was moving from the North to the South and went almost directly overhead.

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Welcome to the forum @BeerAndLoathing!

Very nice first post thank you for sharing.

Check it @mvb @todwatts @Bam

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Nice Meteor Capture @BeerAndLoathing! Props for the Hunter Thompson play on Fear and Loathing. One of my favorite authors.

I got all excited on Feb. 15th at 1:14 a.m. with this capture on one of my outside V3’s … almost ran outside to look for meteor fragments.

But alas, turns out it wasn’t a meteor fireball. Best guess was it was a satellite burning up as it re-entered the atmosphere. @mvb @bam @WyzeDongsheng

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How do you know it wasn’t a meteor fireball?

That was spectacular! Nice catch.

And thanks for the tag @R.Good!

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Hi Mike! I haven’t been online here for a long time. Frustrated at Wyze’s beta selection process. Here’s what a local planetarium official said:

Renae Kerrigan, Curator of Science at the DOME Planetarium in Peoria, Il and she believes this could be a piece of a Starlink Satellite falling out of orbit. Space-X announced last week that 40 Starlink Satellites were damaged beyond repair by a geomagnetic storm and would eventually begin falling out of orbit. She also mentioned that the pattern of break-up and colors from the object burning suggest something man-made rather than a meteor.

@WyzeDongsheng @bam @R.Good @R.Good, thanks for linking me in on this thread!

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I have missed your videos. Last month I posted all of the videos I collected during the December Geminid Shower. Here is the link if you haven’t seen them: December Geminid Meteor Shower

I had read about the Starlink Satellites. I knew they were going to start dropping out of the sky. Just didn’t know it would so close to home. The funny part, they had been warned not to launch, but went ahead anyway.

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Wow! Honestly that looks more like a meteor fireball than a Starlink Satellite. I’ve seen several videos of the Starlink Satellites falling and they weren’t falling that fast like the one in your video. Then again, I could be wrong. Anyhow that’s an awesome catch whatever it was. :smiley:

Wow, that’s really something! Meteor or not, it’s a great capture!

Okay so I pulled out my nerd side as I am known to do with this type of video :slight_smile:

In looking at it, I don’t believe it to be a meteor, I actually believe it to be man-made. The American meteorological society keeps track of all reported fireballs or bolides that have at least five reports reported to them. On the date and time you gave it was reported. Because of that I can actually use their maps and see the trajectory of the fireball

The arrow of the trajectory is circled here in red along with the little people icons with all the recorded reports around it at the time

So looking at a live view currently of starlink satellites
Screenshot_20220220-102347_Find Starlink

and then backing that up (little bit match based any known orbiting maneuvers) of to the date of the witnessed fireball, I believe it to be a higher than chance probability with the trajectories matching, that what you captured was one of the starlink satellites falling back into Earth’s atmosphere out of orbit due to solar activity. No doubt still an awesome capture.

The other thing that leads me to this is that typically any iron meteorite that would last this long in the atmosphere as this fireball did would no doubt have a high iron/nickel composition, iron/nickel meteorites burn a certain color and this one does not match that color, that’s more speculative, but just another little tidbit of evidence I think.

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Not damaged Reference . . . a geomagnetic storm caused the atmosphere to warm, which SpaceX officials said increased atmospheric drag “up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches.” . . .

SpaceX said the positions of the spacecraft were adjusted to try to shield them from the storm and minimize drag, but assessments revealed that the company will be unable to boost many of the newly launched satellites into their higher, operational orbits.

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That’s really interesting @Bam! My first thought when I saw it was that it was a Starlink or some other space debris. It was such an unusual sight - it moved much slower than I would have expected a meteor to be moving, and certainly from North to South. It must have also been extremely high up, as, according to AMS reports, it was visible from Utah to New Mexico. Honestly, I would have expected a Starlink to burn quicker than that but maybe it was just skipping on the upper edges of the atmosphere.

My video was shot through a window, so it is hard to really tell what color it was. What I saw was almost pure white, with fragments glowing light green as they fell away.

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