As of: March 9, 2024, 5:59 p.m
By: Klaus-Maria Mehr
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Very brightly and for a fraction of a second, an object lit up Bavaria's night sky.
Various observers report a green glow.
There is also a photo.
Munich – Many eyes rested excitedly on Bavaria's night sky on Friday evening (March 8th).
For a long time it was unclear whether the ISS battery pack would make its way over Bavaria again and perhaps even burn up here.
And then, for a split second, the sky was actually brightly lit by an object.
A green flash, like an explosion, shone across Bavaria's sky between 10:47 p.m. and 10:48 p.m.
A webcam in Nuremberg even captured the phenomenon.
You can clearly see a tail, typical of a celestial body, which burns up inexorably due to high speed and friction with the atmospheric particles.
A celestial body with a bright tail was clearly captured on a webcam in Nuremberg late on Friday evening - despite the city's brightest light pollution.
© News5
ISS space debris over Bavaria: Image from Nuremberg shows the remarkable brightness of the object
The Nuremberg photo is remarkable because there is a lot of light pollution in Bavaria's second largest city after Munich.
Light pollution describes artificial lighting, such as house or street lighting, which prevents a clear view of the sky.
Despite the many distracting lights, the object could be clearly seen.
It must be an unusually large object, because classic shooting stars do not have this luminosity when they burn up in the atmosphere.
Anyone who looked at the northern night sky in southern Bavaria at 10:47 p.m., like the author of these lines by chance, was also able to observe the very bright, green, damn short flash.
A green flash in the night.
The phenomenon could also be observed further north in Germany, as Martin M., a reader from Osnabrück, writes to us.
He also reports a “bright green flash of light”.
Bright flash of light over Bavaria on Friday evening: It was not the ISS battery pack
Now many are asking themselves: Was it perhaps the ISS battery depot, the size and weight of a small car, that burned up over Bavaria?
The answer is clearly no.
The Air Force's report from late Friday evening that the good piece had burned up over the Atlantic at 8:17 p.m. later turned out to be not entirely correct.
However, it is now clear: The 2.6-ton device, known in space parlance as the “ISS DEB (EP BATTERY)”, re-entered the atmosphere over Guatemala at 8:29 p.m., broke into several pieces of debris on the way to Miami, which then eventually fell into the sea.
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Flash of light over Bavaria: It was actually a ball of fire
So what was it that fascinated many Bavarians on Friday evening?
The technically correct term is fireball or meteor.
A fireball is nothing more than a very large shooting star, i.e. a larger piece of rock that falls from space towards Earth.
Such large chunks fall into the earth's atmosphere over Bavaria several times a year.
The fact that the green flash caused such a stir on Friday may have something to do with the increased attention of Bavaria due to the flight over the ISS debris.
Even the Federal Office for Civil Protection warned.
Of course, it cannot be ruled out that the object on Friday was also space debris.
(By the way: Our Bayern newsletter informs you daily about all the important stories from Bavaria.)
A real meteorite impact over Bavaria would be even more spectacular than our fireball.
A particularly bright shooting star is initially just a meteor.
Only when a piece of the object makes it to the ground do astronomers and geologists speak of a meteorite.
A count from 2013 states that there are seven in a thousand years. Worldwide, something like this only happens about seven times a year.
Judging by the green explosion on Friday, it is unlikely that a piece survived to the ground.
On the other hand, a sighting from October 2019 (see also video above in the text) was more exciting, in which an object crashed over Bavaria in several cascade-like explosions.