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A month after a fireball was snapped by a Calgary photographer streaking across the night sky over the Rockies, researchers with the University of Calgary are now on the hunt for the “rare rock” believed to have fallen into a remote, forested area in B.C.

Judging by the high altitude at which the meteor was first spotted and where it fragmented, it appears to be a weak type of asteroid, producing fragments that represent only three per cent of meteorites that fall on Earth.

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“Because they are weaker, you don’t get a whole lot that survive,” said Lincoln Hanton, research assistant with the University of Calgary’s geoscience department. “It’s quite exciting if we are actually able to recover some of them.”

Night photographer Brett Abernethy and a fellow shutterbug were chasing aurora in Banff in the early hours of Dec. 20 when he saw a fireball fly over Mount Rundle at around 12:25 a.m. It lit up the sky, then broke into three pieces.