VIDEO: shooting star lights up Nanaimo sky

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“The Lyrid meteor shower does kind of taper off, so these showers kind of slowly ramp up and then slowly ramp down; they don’t just turn on and off. So we could be seeing some things from the tail of that Lyrid meteor shower, it could be the start of the next meteor shower, or it could be just a random object entering the Earth’s atmosphere.”

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VIDEO: shooting star lights up Nanaimo sky

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He said without more footage and analysis of the fireball’s flight path, it’s tough to determine its possible origin.

Debris hitting and burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere is a common occurrence, said Arkos.

“Most of it is very small and it burns up, but it doesn’t take a very big piece of debris to hit the atmosphere because they’re moving so fast that the friction with the Earth’s atmosphere basically causes some of them to just explode, and you get these very bright fireballs as a result.”

It’s not the first time this year a fireball lit up the skies of Metro Vancouver last month, which was followed by a sonic boom.

According to the American Meteor Society, there are currently two meteor showers they consider active at the moment, including the Lyrid.

The Eta Aquariids meteor shower is active until May 28th, peaking from May 5-6, and best viewed from the southern tropics.

Arkos said the next shower mid-Island star-gazers will want to watch out for is the Perseid meteor shower in August.

“A lot of these other ones are, even the Lyrids, tend to be very low numbers of meteors. People often want to go out and sit and see one every second kind of thing, that’s not the way those showers tend to work, and so the Perseid’s are the ones that you actually typically get one or two meteors a minute, which is a really high rate in general.”

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