About 200 Texans Reported Seeing a Fireball in the Sky Wednesday Night

The one thing that I miss the most about living in the rural part of East Texas is the beautiful night sky. You don't have a bunch of house lights or city lights lighting up your surroundings making it hard to see the millions of stars above you. I remember as a kid when a big meteor shower could be seen for a couple of nights, we got a beautiful show sitting on the back steps of my parents house in Lindale. About 200 Texans, including a couple of East Texans, got a quick show Wednesday night (January 11) when a meteor created a nice fireball in the sky.

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My Fascination with Space

This kind of news is always interesting to me. I guess its just my interest in space in general. While we won't be alive to see it, it will be awesome when we finally have the technology and know how to travel beyond our group of nine planets (Pluto is a planet. Neil deGrasse Tyson can suck it.)

But I digress.

Current Meteor Shower

From now until Monday, January 16, 2023, we can see The Quadrantids meteor shower. Part of that meteor shower is a comet, known as Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), that can be seen starting today (January 12, 2023) if you have a good telescope. By the end of January and beginning of February (2023), we possibly could see it with the naked eye as long as their is no outside light to intrude on the viewing.

For Wednesday's event, the American Meteor Society (AMS) received about 200 reports of a fireball in the sky over Texas. Most of the reports were from Central and North Texas but two East Texans saw the event, one in Arp and one in Beckville.

Residents caught the fireball on their home security system cameras, too, as did a driver with a dash cam and a sky watcher:

Star Gazing with the Family

This could make for a fun nighttime event for the family. Grab your telescope or your binoculars and check out the show we could be seeing over East Texas for the next month or so.