Bright comet fragment enters sky above Conecuh County, Alabama

Comet fragment over Conecuh County caught on camera.

If you saw something out of the ordinary in the night sky on the morning of Tuesday of last week, you weren’t by yourself.

The Montgomery Advertiser reported on Tuesday of last week that a “bright, green fireball” was seen by witnesses around 3 a.m. that morning and was caused by a comet fragment that entered the earth’s atmosphere about 54 miles above Conecuh County. The fireball was so bright that NASA cameras as far away as Georgia and North Carolina spotted it, but NASA scientists said that the comet fragment was only about five to six inches in diameter.

In the Montgomery Advertiser article, Bill Cooke with the NASA Meteor Environment Office described the object as an “average piece of celestial space rock.” The fragment was traveling around 83,000 miles per hour when it entered the atmosphere and burned up about 33 miles above the earth’s surface.

Historically, Conecuh County and Alabama are no strangers to comets and meteors, and when I read about Tuesday of last week’s comet incident, several previous comet-meteor incidents came immediately to mind.

In a spectacle seen by witnesses across the Southeast, an unusually fantastic meteor shower caused the night of Nov. 12-13 in 1833 to be known as “the night stars fell on Alabama.” This meteor shower created such great excitement across the state that it became a part of Alabama folklore and for years was used to date events. Over 100 years later it inspired a song and book, and the phrase "Stars Fell on Alabama" was put on its license plates in 2002.

Closer to home, on the night of April 23, 1911, a large meteor, emitting sparks, illuminated the sky in Evergreen, Ala. “as bright as day and was a beautiful sight.” It fell “somewhere in the state,” the local newspaper reported.

Of course, no discussion of Alabama and meteors would be complete without mentioning the famous Hodges Meteorite Incident. It was at 2:46 p.m. on Nov. 30, 1954 that a meteorite weighing 8-1/2 pounds crashed into Ann Elizabeth Hodges of Sylacauga as she rested on her living room couch.

The meteorite fell through the roof of her rental house and struck her left hip and hand. Awakened by the impact, she thought the gas space heater had exploded, but then she noticed a grapefruit-sized rock lying on the floor and a hole in the roof.

The impact severely bruised Hodges’ hip, and she became an instant celebrity. The “Hodges Meteorite,” the first one known to have caused injury to a human, is now housed on the second floor of the Alabama Museum of Natural History in Tuscaloosa. I went there a few years ago to see this meteorite for myself, and it’s well worth your time to go see it if you’re ever in the Tuscaloosa area.

In the end, I’d like to hear from anyone who happened to see the comet over Conecuh County on Tuesday of last week.