A rare green fireball lit up the skies over the Philly region and elsewhere

People across the region who said they saw a spectacular green fireball light up Tuesday’s brilliant blue skies followed by a sonic-like boom evidently weren’t hallucinating, and they may have witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.

The American Meteor Society logged reports from the Philadelphia region — including the city, Doylestown, West Deptford, and Wilmington — and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, plus New York and Connecticut.

“This is a legit fireball” with “over 200″ reported sightings, said Bob Lunsford, the society’s fireball report coordinator. “This is the first time a green fireball has been reported in daylight.” Lunsford has been logging reports for 20 years, about 500,000 meteors by his count.

Unfortunately, he said, the available videos have been “underwhelming,” so no images were available.

As for the possible source, that’s going to take “more study,” he said. It is possible that this and other fireballs could be related to an “obscure” meteor shower, in which cometic fragments become visible as they pass through the Earth’s atmosphere.

Last month a National Weather Service meteorologist in the Pittsburgh area captured a fireball on his home video camera.

Whatever the source, Tuesday’s fireball put on quite the show for the fortunate earthlings who caught sight of it.

The Doylestown witness reported seeing “several bright spots spitting and moving separately behind the main fireball,” exhibiting colors of “light blue, light green, yellow,” lasting 3.5 seconds.

Three Philadelphia witnesses also said the meteor was visible for 3.5 seconds, and an observer in Wilmington saw a piece or two ”completely breaking up and disintegrating/disappearing," describing the object as being as bright as the moon.

Fireballs are meteors large enough to withstand a journey into Earth’s atmosphere, where they are ignited by the resulting friction, actually develop quite frequently, perhaps several thousand a day, the meteor society says.

So why aren’t they sighted more often? Some are lost to the daylight, or occur in the dead of night when people are sleeping.

And a big reason why so few are sighted: The vast majority of the planet’s land masses are uninhabited, and 70% of the surface is covered by ocean.

If you see one flaming out, you won’t be able to figure out where it’s going to land.

The meteor society points out that once a meteor, which could have been traveling as fast as 150,000 mph, gets to within 9 to 12 miles of the Earth’s surface, the visible light will disappear as it slows to mere 200 to 400 mph.