Expert: Huge fireball likely from Civil War-era comet

Didn't see it but many did as there's no sign nor reports of this landing anywhere and some are speculating at this early stage that it which happened around 10:15 eastern could have been space junk due to the fiery re entry which you can see plainly right here.

Although the article below states otherwise, calling it a "civil war era" meteor which I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to mean, I would assume it's when it was "spotted and identified" by astrologists in space in that time period.  (Armageddon around the corner!! lol but I'm not laughin')

Expert: Huge fireball likely from Civil War-era comet - Chicago Breaking News: "The fireball that crossed Midwest skies last night may have been a basketball-size meteor from a comet first discovered at the start of the Civil War, according to experts.

David Eicher, editor and chief of Astronomy Magazine, said that while it's believed the fireball seen Wednesday night was a meteor, that wouldn't be known for sure until and unless it is found on the ground. Astronomers believe if the object landed, it would have come down in the Great Lakes area, said Eicher, whose magazine is based in Waukesha, Wisc. There were no reports that it had been found.

'It was an extraordinarily bright meteor,' said Eicher. 'As bright as this thing was, the odds are that it didn't completely burn up before it hit the ground.'

But he also couldn't completely rule out that what people saw were pieces of a falling satellite reentering the Earth's atmosphere as space junk.

He estimated that on impact a burning meteor could have ended up the size of a baseball. The amount of light that the object emitted indicted it was either a large chunk of stone or iron, he said.

Usually, meteorites that cause a streak in the sky tend to be only the size of sand or a pea, Eicher said. This one--assuming it was one--may have come from April's Lyrid meteorite showers as debris from a comet named Thatcher after the man who first discovered it in 1861.

'It was probably a very large chunk, relatively speaking, of cometary debris that was left in the wake, the trail, of this comet's orbit,'' he said.

While he could not point to the object and definitively say it was a meteor, he said circumstantial evidence points to it--chiefly, that the sighting came during the Lyrid showers, which will reach their peak Saturday."

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