Brilliant Fireball Over Manitoba

100+ reports from 3 provinces and North Dakota

March is right in the middle of evening fireball season, when an abundance of fireballs seem to occur. The AMS received more than 100 reports so far of a fireball event that occurred over southern Manitoba on March 23rd, 2022 around 21:47 pm CDT (02:47 Universal Time on March 24th). The AMS #2022-1984 event was mainly seen from Manitoba but we also received reports from Ontario, Saskatchewan, and the state of North Dakota. Note that on our event page that many impressive videos were shared of this event.

The ground trajectory computed from the witness reports shows that the meteor was traveling from West to East in a short path approximately 200km north of Winnipeg.

Photos and Videos

So far, we received 11 videos of this fireball.

Fireball, Bolide?

Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth’s atmosphere each day. The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight. Those that occur at night also stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them.

Additionally, the brighter the fireball, the more rare is the event. As a general thumb rule, there are only about 1/3 as many fireballs present for each successively brighter magnitude class, following an exponential decrease. Experienced observers can expect to see only about one fireball of magnitude -6 (crescent moon) or better for every 200 hours of meteor observing, while a fireball of magnitude -4 (Venus) can be expected about once every 20 hours or so.

Robert Lunsford

Bob has been interested in the stars as far back as he can recall His first experience with meteors was a biggie, the 1966 Leonid shower. In 1980, a major awaking occurred. He received a sample copy of Meteor News. He was amazed to learn there was a group actually devoted strictly to meteor observing! He joined the group also started to view some of the minor showers list among the pages of Meteor News. Lastly, he was contracted by Springer Publishing in 2007 to write a book on observing meteors. The book is now available and hopefully will be a useful guide to all interested in the enjoyable field of meteor observing.