If you saw something burn up in the skies over Alabama Saturday evening, you weren't alone.
Actually it appears there were a couple of things that streaked across the night sky, one at about 5:30 p.m. Central time and the other at about 10:11 p.m.
Meteorologist James Spann said on social media that he'd received more information on the first event from William J. Cooke, lead of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office.
According to Spann's post, Cooke said that the fireball seen at 5:30 p.m. was "caused by a piece of an asteroid weighing about a pound hitting the atmosphere at 33,500 miles per hour. It was first visible at an altitude of 49 miles over Heflin, moving slightly south of west. It passed right over Anniston before disintegrating 30 miles above the Coosa River north of Lincoln."
As for the second noteworthy event, at 10:11 p.m. the American Meteor Society said it received 120 reports to its fireball log. Those reports, including 10 videos and more than a dozen photos, came from observers in a cluster of Southern states including Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. The photos and videos can be viewed at fireball.amsmeteors.org.
A video posted to YouTube, like those, shows a relatively slow-moving streak with a bright core in front, trailed by smaller bright spots, suggestive of an object breaking up as it burned.
Spann said unnamed astronomers had identified it as a case of "space junk" burning up as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. On X.com, astronomer Jonathan McDowell identified the object as a Chinese commercial imaging satellite designated GaoJing 1-02, operated by a company named SpaceView.
McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said the satellite "reentered above New Orleans at 0408 UTC Dec 22 (10.08 pm CST Dec 21) heading northbound towards MS, AR, MO and was widely observed."
Marc Fries, a scientist at the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at the Johnson Space Center, said on X.com that several radar systems saw "something shedding debris at low altitude over SE Missouri," with reports of sonic booms in the region. In an exchange with McDowell he said it looked "like something hit the ground near Poplar Bluff, Mo."