This is pretty awesome: while filming a time lapse of the night sky, Marc Donahue inadvertently captured an exploding meteorite in the atmosphere earlier in July in Santa Cruz, California.

While shooting some timelapses, we saw a huge bright flash in the sky. It even lit up the entire ground. We looked up and saw a huge streak across the sky of burning dust. I did the calculations and the dust fell from the sky for at least 50 frames of my timelapse. Each exposure was 15 seconds long, so that means the burning dust fell for 12.5 minutes.


It’s a lucky shot, and a really neat thing to see captured on film.

[h/t to Marc Donahue]

