Bright Fireball West of Denver, CO on October 3rd, 2021

More than 40 reports from 3 states

The AMS received more than 40 reports so far about a fireball event that occurred west of Denver, CO on October 2rd, 2021 around 4:34 AM CDT (10:34 Universal Time). The AMS #2021-6226 event was mainly seen from Colorado but we also received reports from Wyoming and New Mexico.

Trajectory and videos

Below is a compilation of the 6 videos we received so far:

The computer generated trajectory from the list of current witnesses, indicates a short path just west of Denver, CO: the fireball was travelling from South West to North East.

Fireball, Bolide?

Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth’s atmosphere each day. The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight. Those that occur at night also stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them.

Additionally, the brighter the fireball, the more rare is the event. As a general thumb rule, there are only about 1/3 as many fireballs present for each successively brighter magnitude class, following an exponential decrease. Experienced observers can expect to see only about 1 fireball of magnitude -6 or better for every 200 hours of meteor observing, while a fireball of magnitude -4 can be expected about once every 20 hours or so.

Vincent Perlerin

Vincent Perlerin, PhD used to be a researcher in Computational Linguistics. He is now a software developer, a web designer, a community manager, an illustrator and many other things. He is working on the American Meteor Society under the supervision of Mike Hankey. Vincent is the lead developer of all the AMS projects. He's also the lead developer of the International Meteor Organization Website and the IMO online Databases management system.