MOUNTAIN VIEW COUNTY – A Sundre tank truck driver’s dashboard camera recently captured some out-of-this-world footage.
Colin McNutt, who on the night of Oct. 29 was travelling in a northbound direction through Innisfail on Highway 2 just after 7 p.m., described what he saw as a sort of blend of emerald neon green that faded to white before disappearing.
“I just noticed this streak of light coming down,” McNutt told the Albertan on Nov. 4 during a phone interview shortly after returning home for a few days from another haul.
“Initially at the top, it was completely green when I first saw it,” he said. “It went from green to white; it was pure white at the end when it vanished – that was the last colour I saw.”
Although his dash cam had previously been experiencing issues and hadn’t been functioning properly, McNutt said he had just recently gotten the device working again.
Curiosity quickly got the better of him. Wondering if his dash cam captured footage of the meteor, he drove a little farther up the road before finding a safe place to pull over in a rest stop and check the footage.
To his pleasant surprise, the video – which he also posted on local social media – clearly showed the fireball that streaked through the night sky over the span of several seconds. Once he had a chance, McNutt said he went online to report the sighting to the American Meteor Society.
However, the dashboard camera does not accurately capture colour, so the fireball as seen in the video looks white, he said.
Legally allowed to drive no more than 13 hours per day or about 273 hours a month, McNutt said he tries to maximize his time on the road, which includes upward of 100 hours a month spent driving at night.
“I’m on the road quite a bit,” he said, adding more of that time will be spent in the dark with the changing seasons.
While McNutt has aside from seeing the odd shooting star camping rarely witnessed anything like this fireball before, the experience wasn’t quite unprecedented for him.
About five or six years ago, he recalled witnessing another celestial incident with a brighter light that stayed up in the sky even longer.
“For something to burn up for that long of a time, there was some significant size involved,” said McNutt, adding he was among several others who reported that sighting.
“It was a re-entry of parts of an Indian rocket,” he said, adding that eventually finding out what he’d witnessed was a thrill.
But at the time, he felt like the sky was almost falling and that debris would start raining down nearby any second.
“It felt like it was that close, and it literally just kind of turned into sparkles and broke up into hundreds of pieces that all just burned up right above the ball diamonds here,” he said. “Now, it actually was like 1,200 kilometres (away).”
McNutt added that while shooting stars aren’t that rare, seeing a fireball last for several seconds before vanishing is much less common.
“I count myself pretty fortunate I got to see a rocket part re-entering the atmosphere, and then I got to see that cool fireball,” he said.
Taurid meteor shower most likely source
So, what did McNutt see that night?
“Every time that something like this is seen in the sky, it’s what’s known as a meteor or a fireball,” said Chris Herd, a professor with the University of Alberta’s Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department.
“A fireball is just a bright version of a meteor,” said Herd, adding meteors are rocks of different kinds hurtling through space that come careening into the atmosphere at speeds well in excess of 60,000 kilometres per hour.
“And then because of that speed, there’s a lot of friction and the outside heats up and glows and you get the streak of light in the sky,” he explained, adding, “The larger the object, the brighter the fireball.”
A sizeable enough space rock that survives the turbulent trip to the planet’s surface is known as a meteorite, but they mostly tend to burn up along the way, he said.
“There’s just so much friction between the object and the atmosphere that it just burns up completely and vaporizes,” he said. “You have to get to an object more like the size of a basketball or bigger before you can hope to have anything survive that rough ride through the atmosphere and make it to the ground as a meteorite.”
Asked if his department had received any reported sightings from the night of Oct. 29, he said, “We have cameras that we have set up around the province through the U of A in a partnership with colleagues in Australia at Curtin University; these observatories where we look for fireballs.”
As fate would have it, the network of cameras indeed captured similar sightings that same night, but at different times, he said, adding someone else had also submitted an inquiry about another sighting at another time.
“I thought, ‘No, we didn’t pick that up, but we picked up something else,’” he said. “So, this is something like the third event in the same night. Then I realized that what’s probably going on, is what’s called the Taurid meteor shower.”
Every year at about this time, Earth’s orbit takes the planet through a celestial cloud of debris left in a comet’s wake, he said.
Of course meteors can happen any time of the year when any random space rock slams into the atmosphere unannounced, he said.
“However, during certain times of the year, the Earth passes through a part of space where there’s more of this debris. In the case of the Taurid meteor shower, the Earth passes through a stream of debris left by Comet Encke,” he said.
“It always happens from a specific location in the sky, near the constellation of Taurus – which is why they’re called the Taurids – and you get multiple meteors in a given night.”
Additionally, he said the Taurid meteor shower, which returns annually from September to November, might depending on the year be more active than other years.
“Apparently this year, there's some bright ones,” he said. “That’s probably what we were seeing.”
Asked whether any fragments of space rock, or meteorites, had been recovered in the fallout of the several sightings on Oct. 29, he said no.
“In this case, these are at most pebble-sized fragments that are from a comet,” he said.
“And cometary debris is very weak and the material itself is very small; so pebble-sized at most and most of the time it’s less than that, like a grain of sand. And that’s going to burn up completely in the atmosphere given the speed at which it comes in and the amount of energy involved.”
Residents and motorists might anticipate further similar sightings in the coming week or so, as the Taurid meteor shower will this year reportedly be most active Nov. 5-12.
“It’s kind of incredible how things are,” said McNutt. “Space is just so interesting to me.”
