Fast, bright and gone in seconds: a meteor hurtles over CRD

They’re fairly rare and zoom through the sky at 40 kilometres per second—so, if you missed the bright, fast-moving fireball just after midnight Tuesday night, you aren’t alone.

Astronomers figure it was a bolide meteor.

“Just looking at the tapes, I would agree with that judgment,” said Chris Gainor, former president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

“We can surmise it's a bolide because of the brightness.”

Videos of the meteor lighting up the sky lit up social media and got the attention of Victoria astronomer Dave Balam, the principal investigator at Spaceguard Canada, which tracks these celestial sightings.

“We have 121 reports (at the American Meteor Society), all the way from 100 Mile House north, all the way down to Newton, Oregon,” said Balam, who “guesstimates” the bolide meteor to have been “somewhere between the size of a baseball and a football, not big.”

He speculates it likely broke up into pieces in northern Oregon or southern Washington.

Online chats were ablaze with how bright the sky became.

“I live on the north end of Camano Island in Washington state, and I saw this bright streak coming down around 12:12 am this morning, 04/29/26,” one person wrote.

“I saw it too in Lantzville!!!” said another. “It was insanely big and bright and looked SO close. One of the best moments of my life. I never thought I'd get to experience [it].”

Balam and Gainor said a half-dozen or so of these meteoroids generally enter the atmosphere above this region each year, part of the space rock onslaught our planet faces all the time.

“You know, in reality, the Earth is being bombarded with between 100 and 200 tons of meteoric material every 24 hours,” Balam said.

“They generally just sort of hit the top of the atmosphere, and they'll float around up there for a long time, because they're quite often made of cometary material, which is just sort of dirty snowball material,” he said.

“On the other hand, you have meteoric iron, and those come down fairly quickly, even little tiny bits.”

And believe it or not, he says, some of those tiny bits end up in our eavestroughing. He says if you clean out your rain gutters and pans as you would pan for gold, all you would need is a strong magnet.

“I can pretty well guarantee you'll have at least one nickel-iron micrometeorite sticking to that magnet.”

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See videos on the American Meteor Society website.