Bright green fireball spotted during northern lights in Alberta

A fireball was spotted over Alberta on Friday night. CTV News Edmonton's Noah Rishaug has more on the occurrence.

Albertans are reporting seeing a fireball close to midnight on Friday.

Photographer Chris Ratzlaff was looking up at the sky that night for the aurora borealis, or northern lights, which were so bright they were visible even at his home in Calgary.

“I was recording it with my phone, just panning around the horizon… (and) I noticed this fireball streaking into my view of my camera,” he recalled in an interview on Monday. “I just redirected from the aurora and started following the fireball as it went down.”

He called it a lucky break, albeit one that happens more frequently with the growing prevalence of modern cameras that can shoot video in low light.

“A real-time live video of a fireball coming down? That’s a unique experience. That’s a unique capture, and it does get a lot of traction in the social media space,” he said.

By Monday at noon, his video had been viewed more than half a million times where he posted it to the Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook page.

The bright green fireball could also be seen in Edmonton and was likely what Frank Florian, senior manager of planetary and space sciences at the Telus World of Science Edmonton, calls a “sporadic meteor.”

“It means that we didn’t know this one was coming, and it was probably about the size of maybe a desk, maybe smaller,” he said.

“It doesn’t have to be very large for it to actually create a spectacle like this one did.”

Seeing the fireball and the northern lights at the same time is already a rare occurrence, Florian says, but noctilucent clouds, or night shining clouds, were also visible.

“They’re pretty rare, we only see them at this particular time of the year, and we think that those noctilucent clouds are in fact created, or at least partly created, due to meteoritic dust,” he adds.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) has received multiple reports of a fireball from Alberta and Saskatchewan residents that evening.

The AMS defines a fireball as a very bright meteor.

“It was amazing, I could almost reach up and touch it, it was so close, and it wasn’t even that fast, all things considered,” said Heather Hovdestad, who happened to be walking out to her garage and caught sight of the fireball.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Florian and Ratzlaff say there is a chance the meteor made it to the surface, but finding the remains of one, especially one as small as this one likely was, is like “finding a needle in a haystack.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Noah Rishaug