'Safe Fireball' Lights Up Sky Over the U.S. and Canada — See Video

A fireball lit up the sky over portions of the United States and Canada over the weekend.

The Minor Planet Center said the "fast moving object" impacted the Earth's atmosphere at 3:27 a.m. over Brantford, Ontario on Saturday. After striking "in the skies above Niagara Falls" it became "a safe fireball," according to the European Space Agency, which noted this marked the 6th time in history that an object in space was detected before making impact.

According to NASA, a fireball is "an unusually bright meteor."

The space object — which received the temporary designation #C8FF042 from the ESA — was first detected in images taken at Mount Lemmon Survey near Tucson, Ariz., according to The Minor Planet Center.

The American Meteor Society said it received 59 reports about the fireball, which was spotted flying over portions of southern Canada as well as states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland and Indiana.

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It was even photographed in Toronto by Earth Cam's "Tower View" camera, according to CTV News.

Others in and around Hamilton also reported hearing a loud boom, according to CTV News and The New York Times.

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Mike Hankey, operations manager for the American Meteor Society, told the Times that "there is a chance" that some "recoverable" meteorites could be found "near Grimsby, Ontario, or St. Catharines, Ontario, near the Niagara Falls area" in Canada.

"When these things happen, the astronomy community wants to know where the impact took place and, if meteorites survived, they want to recover them as soon as possible," Hankey told the outlet.

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Saturday's meteor spotting took place amid the Northern Taurids meteor shower, which has been active since Oct. 13, according to EarthSky.org.

This is just the sixth time that a meteor's impact has been predicted, but the ESA said the capability to predict these events "is rapidly improving."

Five other asteroids have been located prior to impact since 2008, including one earlier this year, according to a previous press release from the agency.

New technology has allowed scientists to get a better look at the objects approaching Earth from space, per the March release. Additional "sky scanning telescopes" are on the way, as well, including what the ESA calls the "first state-of-the-art Flyeye telescope," which will split images into 16 "subimages" to broaden its field of vision.

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Detlef Koschny, ESA's acting Head of Planetary Defence, said the new telescopes will give experts the ability to scour "a large area of the sky in just one night."

"This will reduce the chance that we miss any interesting object," Koschny said in March's release, following the fifth-predicted meteor impact.