Blue fireball lights up Cork sky
“We think it might have been a random fireball,” David Moore, editor of Astronomy Ireland magazine, told the Irish Examiner.
“A fireball is just a piece of material burning up in the earth’s atmosphere, it’s just a very bright shooting star,” he added.
Mr Moore said that if anyone in the south west of Ireland saw the flashes of blue light, to visit Astronomy.ie and click on the link ‘Report a Fireball.’
Just saw the whole #sky light up looking North from #Cork Like #lightning only none on radar?? What gives?? #Meteor? #Fireball? #Explosion?
— Darren Forde (@darrenforde) July 21, 2016
“We’ll produce a report seeing where it landed, see if any of it survived. The last time we were successful was in 1999, it was found in Carlow. The pieces were so small, you could fit them into a mug. A collector from Scotland bought it and he was later selling pieces of it for 50 times the value of gold,” Mr Moore said.
People reported seeing the sky flash blue at approximately 1am yesterday.
“I have never seen anything like it in my life, it was pure blue and lit up the whole sky,” said Maria Houlihan on the Cork Safety Alerts Facebook page.
“We got calls from people all over Cork including the city centre, Dublin Hill, Dromahane, Banteer, Knockraha, Cloyne, Courtmacsherry and Kanturk who saw a flash in the sky around 12.50am,” said a spokesperson from the Neil Prendeville Show on Red FM.
