Fireball! Brilliant meteor streaks across Indiana’s early-morning sky (videos)

Early Tuesday morning (Dec. 10), witnesses across the state of Indiana reported sightings of a fireball blazing overhead.

Cloudy skies across the state Tuesday made viewing the the streaking inferno difficult, but 47 reports documenting the event were submitted to the American Meteor Society (AMS) website, which crowdsources and tracks meteor activity across North America. At approximately 4:05 a.m. ET (0905 GMT), a fireball was tracked traveling south by southeast, just west of Indianapolis.

"It lit up the sky like it was daylight," reported Andrew B. through the AMS Report a Fireball submission form. Other witnesses accounts read similarly, with Di M. saying it was the "brightest short duration of light" they'd ever seen.

The morning's cloudy skies likely contributed to the profound luminosity, as the light from the already bright flare of the fireball was dispersed by the clouds like a lampshade illuminating the city below.

Events like this one are somewhat rare to witness, although meteors and other debris burning up in Earth's atmosphere happens regularly. Fireballs like the one seen on Tuesday are referred to as bolides. They appear as fast, bright streaks across the sky before reaching an explosive end as they incinerate in the atmosphere.

One Indiana resident, Michael Denney (MikeDVB), caught the fireball using a camera on his front door. He posted the video to YouTube, and then to the Indiana subreddit, where many said they also witnessed the early morning event.

"This was very cool. I'm a little disappointed that it was cloudy — but it's a pretty good view regardless," Denney wrote on AMS. A slight "thump" can be heard near the beginning of Denney's video, and in his report to AMS, he described what he heard as a loud sonic boom. Other AMS submissions corroborate what Denney heard, reporting either concurrent or delayed sound associated with the fireball's atmospheric collision.