The NASA All Sky Fireball Network detected this beauty on May 16, 2013 at 03:11:50 UTC.  Observed by 6 meteor cameras, this fireball penetrated deep into the atmosphere, making it down to an altitude of 36 km (22 miles).

A view of the fireball from Cartersville, Georgia.  (NASA/MEO)

The 350 gram meteoroid responsible for this brilliant display entered the atmosphere at around 22 km/s (49,000 mph) -- slow for a meteoroid! -- and decelerated to about 10 km/s (22,000 mph) before disintegrating over northwest Georgia.

Map showing the location of 6 cameras in the NASA All Sky Fireball Network.  Color-coded circles indicate the approximate field of view of each camera.  The meteor's path is shown in white. (NASA/MEO/D. Moser)

Calculations indicate a radiant in the constellation Libra.

Same meteor -- same location -- two different meteor cameras! The video shows the same meteor (an Eta Aquarid!) from one of our all-sky cameras and from our wide-field camera (~20x15 degree FOV) both located at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

A composite image of 13 Eta Aquarid meteors from the NASA All Sky Fireball Network station in Mayhill, New Mexico the morning of May 6, 2013.  Clouds seriously hampered our view of the ETAs this year. Observations reported to the International Meteor Organization indicate an outburst in the early hours of  May 6th UTC.

(Credit: All Sky Camera Network)

Despite interference from the moon and clouds (and rising sun!), this morning we snagged our first observations of the 2013 Eta Aquarids.  Here's an image of one from the all sky camera in Tullahoma, Tennessee.  The Eta Aquarids peak in the pre-dawn hours on May 6 and are material from Halley's comet.  They zoom around the solar system at speeds near 148,000 mph.  The one seen here burned up completely in our atmosphere over Nunnelly, Tennessee at a height of 58.7 miles above the ground.

(Credit: All Sky Camera Network)

(Credit: MSFC Meteoroid Environment Office)

A Lyrid meteor streaks though the dawn sky over North Georgia College and State University. Moving at 105,800 mph, this inch-diameter piece of Comet Thatcher lasted less than one and a half seconds, burning up 46 miles above Earth's surface. The second image shows the same meteor seen from the Tellus Science Museum located in Cartersville, GA, some 50 miles distant. By measuring the change in the meteor's position (triangulation), we can determine its trajectory and speed.
 
Lyrids are pieces of debris from the periodic Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher and have been observed for more than 2,600 years. In mid-April of each year, Earth runs into the stream of debris from the comet, which causes the Lyrid meteor shower. You can tell if a meteor belongs to a particular shower by tracing back its path to see if it originates near a specific point in the sky, called the radiant. The constellation in which the radiant is located gives the shower its name, and in this case, Lyrids appear to come from a point in the constellation Lyra.

Images were taken by Rob Suggs and Aaron Kingery in twilight through cirrus clouds around 00:36 UT on 17 Mar 2013 with a 14 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope at Marshall Space Flight Center's Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatoryin Huntsville, Ala.  The detector was a low-light level B&W video camera with a focal reducer giving a 20 arcminute horizontal field of view.  The view shows the over-exposed coma and a faint division in the 2 sides of the dust tail.  The images were not flat-fielded or dark-subtracted.

The darker image is a stack of 60 video frames (2 seconds), enhanced to show the tail. The lighter image is produced by simply stacking 1600 video frames (53.3 seconds).