Green Fire in the Sky - Meteor or Something Else?

A few days ago, around dusk, I witnessed a green burning-sparking-glowing ball travel across the sky in front of me as I was driving.

I was pointed south in my vehicle and the fireball traveled generally east to west and was located maybe 15 -20 miles south of Austin. It traveled about 40 degrees in my vision in about 2.5 seconds. I have to guess on the altitude but maybe 1000-2000 feet, and it had a seemingly completely flat trajectory. It wasnt falling or curving. After apx 2.5 seconds it either quit burning/lighting or disappeared. It looked like a tight green burning/glowing ball and was small in my vision - quarter of a pencil head maybe. It may have been a meteor but Ive never seen nor heard of them burning green and the altitude / flat trajectory seemed odd.

And that was it. Im curious if anyone has seen something like this.

I would venture meteor, I have had the luck of seeing a few of them in various shades of color. Angle and flight path is conditional on the velocity of the meteor upon impact with the atmosphere it could easily burn out before showing any sign of visibly lowering in altitude.

Just a thought though and could be wrong.
Crim

a reply to: pirhanna

Maybe you saw The Green Lady. Check out the Weird California Sighting thread in the Aircraft Projects section of this site.

I'm sure some of the folks in that super long thread would love to hear about your sighting.

a reply to: pirhanna

Sounds like you saw a Green Fireball Meteor , it may have been connected to the Orionids shower which happens in October.
A meteorite high in nickel shows as green.

a reply to: pirhanna

I saw my second green one ever this past Tuesday, same directionals, but in northern IL, around 9/10p. Mine appeared to curve across about 30° of the sky and ended with a silent yellow flash. Mine was definitely a meteor - wasn't exceedingly large and no perceptible sound to the "explosion" as some of the larger fireballs have.

Awesome nevertheless.

a reply to: pirhanna

Just a word on colour of meteor burn.

Colour of light given off by the heat arising from meteors burning up in the atmosphere, depends largely on the chemical composition of the meteor itself. I am sure you recall high school chemistry lessons, where enterprising and inspiring teachers would burn various chemicals under controlled conditions, to show the class that flame colour can be different depending on the chemical being burned, and this applies to meteors just as readily as it does anything else.

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate your input. I know that different materials burn different colors. I was just unaware that meteors sometimes had content that would burn green. I will check out the green lady thread.