NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick is in the spotlight again for his latest video that captures a bright green meteor explosion in the night sky over Earth. The commander of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission onboard the International Space Station (ISS) shared a new series of timelapse photos.
The camera positioned over Egypt’s Cairo vividly captured a bright green outburst on Monday, September 3, at 5:42 am (IST). This happened while the astronaut was trying to take a shot of the Milky Way’s core. The fireball explosion shown in the timelapse resulted from the disintegration of the meteor after entering Earth’s atmosphere.
Taking to social media platform X, Matthew Dominick wrote, “I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought.” He added, “They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — a rather bright one called a bolide.”
Keeping in mind the curiosity and admiration of cosmic enthusiasts and sky gazers for the miracles of the universe, Matthew Dominick shared a slowed-down timelapse to one frame per second. This enables us to see the meteor streaking and then exploding. Captured from inside the space station’s Cupola module, the clip includes 20 individual images. Matthew Dominick said, “When I went to review the shots afterwards, I found the bolide.”
The astronaut shared another version of the timelapse in the comments section of the post, a longer and faster frame with the caption, “It is interesting to compare the size of the bolide blast to other objects in view like the Mediterranean, Cairo, or lightning strikes.”
In the faster version, the shooting star appears as just a brief flash at the top right of the frame.
Matthew Dominick has emerged as a prolific space photographer with magnificent shots of the aurora, moon, lightning, nebula, and more. This viral post has garnered over 32.01 lakh views in just a few days and over 21,000 likes.