A blue-green streak lit up the sky early on Saint Patrick’s Day morning for a good part of England, followed by a bright white tail until it disappeared after several seconds.
Reports of this fireball—which many are now calling the St. Patrick’s Day meteor—came from all over, including London, Hampshire, and the east coast of England. It appeared at 3:16 in the morning.
The UK Meteor Observation Network (UKMON) managed to catch the meteor on film:
“The very large fireball reported by public was first noticed by our Church Crookham station at 3:16 this morning,” UKMON told The Guardian. “It momentarily overloaded the camera with light and with second video we will be able to triangulate and calculate the orbit soon.”
As to where the meteor came from, Dr. John Mason of the British Astronomical Association told the BBC that it likely came from the asteroid belts between Mars and Jupiter, and that it was seen as green because it heated up the atmospheric oxygen surrounding it.
“Meteors of this kind are not uncommon,” Mason told the BBC.
But that doesn’t mean it was a normal sighting by any means.
“This is the biggest meteor sighting we have recorded,” Richard Kacerek from UKMON told the BBC. “It lasted for a few seconds. It was seen for hundreds of miles.”
Of course, there may be a small bit of irony that a green meteor was seen in England on St. Patrick’s Day—on the Irish Flag, green represents the native people of Ireland, whereas the orange bit represents the British supporters of King William of Orange who settled in Northern Ireland in the 18th century.
Simplifying a long, complicated history, there was an enormous amount of animosity between the native Irish and the British supplants, which came to a (semi-final) head during the Easter Rising—which has its 100th anniversary on April 24th of this year.
The Rising itself was a failed rebellion—the leaders were captured and executed—but it galvanized the Irish people in a way they had not been before. By January of 1919, an Irish parliament had met and had declared Ireland independent, and by 1922, a treaty between the UK and Ireland created the Irish Free State. In 1949, it was formally declared a republic free of the British Commonwealth.
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Image credit: Richard Bassom/BBC
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