Sunday meteor fireball was visible over 10 U.S. states

Skywatchers in 10 states in the Midwestern United States got a treat early on Sunday evening as a fireball careened through the atmosphere and produced a fiery trail. The streak - which in at least one video seemed to be traveling along a curiously horizontal trajectory - was actually a fireball blazing a path over IL and Iowa, according to the American Meteor Society, and luckily a few cameras were rolling and pointed in the right direction to capture the event.

The fireball was caught on video, like the one above from Missouri, by both alert folks on the ground and security cameras. The brief event was caused by a meteor blasting past a little before sunset, etching a bright line in the dim evening sky.

The object is spotted at a great distance, appearing relatively small from the vantage point of land.

Instead, it was a rather ordinary space rock burning up in that extraordinary way they do when they collide with our atmosphere. The American Meteor Society says that fireballs are typically brighter than a magnitude -4, which is the equivalent of Venus's visibility. Hundreds of people in Iowa, Michigan, Indiana, Nebraska, Minnesota, Kansas, Ohio, Wisconsin, and IL reported seeing a ball of light streak across the sky between 8:30 and 9:00 pm CDT yesterday.

AMS estimated the fireball to have a shallow entry angle. If the latter was true, this would mean that the fireball has actually entered the Earth's atmosphere without being detected prior to its landing.

The second fireball, filmed shooting across Spain at 65,000kph, began at an altitude of around 89km (55 miles) over the province of Almería, and ended at a height of about 31km over the Mediterranean, according to Jose M. Madiedo from the International Meteor Organization.