The last meteor shower of 2022 over southcentral Alaska has been caught on numerous home security cameras, illuminating the early morning winter solstice sky with a flash of fiery color.
National Weather Service Climatologist, Brian Brettschneider, whose doorbell camera captured the light show, was among the first to know about it as he received a notification showing footage of the streaking light and a bright flare.
Owing to reports of a “low rumble” accompanying the meteor flash from Mat-Su Valley residents, physics professor Mark Conde of the University of Alaska Fairbanks speculated that the meteor could have been quite large.
He said: “The larger the object, the deeper it penetrates into the atmosphere. In order to be heard, I think it has to get down to maybe 30-40 kilometers altitude, and that requires a somewhat bigger object.”
Mike Hankey, director of operations for the American Meteor Society, estimated the size of the meteor to be something between a basketball and a grocery cart and suspected that some fractured particles made it to the ground as a meteorite.
The Society hopes to calculate the trajectory of the meteor by collecting more witness reports and data from Alaskan residents.
Ursid meteors emerge from the vicinity of the orange star Kochab, the brighter of the two outer stars that form the “bowl” of the Little Dipper constellation. Since Kochab never disappears from the night sky for most stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere, these meteor showers are visible all through the night.
Notable Ursid meteor showers of the past include the years 1945 and 1986, when dozens of meteors were counted in a single night, as well as the year 2000, and then from 2006 through 2008, when counts reached 30 meteors per hour.
