If you were out at the Spruce Meadows Christmas Market on Sunday evening and suddenly noticed everyone around you staring at the sky with their phones out, you weren't witnessing a mass hallucination. Something genuinely spectacular was happening overhead.
The "Wait, What Is THAT?" Moment
Picture it: families bundled up, hot chocolate in hand, browsing the Christmas stalls. Then around 5:30 p.m., a burning streak of light tears across the sky. Joseph Madamesila happened to be there with his family and managed to snag an 11-second video on his iPhone.
"I saw something burning and moving through the sky," he told CTV. "I just thought I should take a video of it."
Good instincts, Joseph.
The fireball wasn't just a Calgary phenomenon. Reports flooded in from across Alberta — Wainwright, Edmonton, Lacombe, Red Deer, Airdrie, Okotoks, Lethbridge, Pincher Creek. Even a University of Calgary aurora camera in Lucky Lake, Saskatchewan caught the show. Anita Den Hertog, watching from near Drumheller, says the thing moved fast and actually made noise.
So What Was It?
Here's where it gets interesting. This wasn't your garden-variety meteor.
Jeroen Stil, an associate professor in physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary, says all signs point to a piece of rocket debris from a launch that took off from New Zealand back on November 5th. The chunk was scheduled to re-enter Earth's atmosphere on December 1st, which tracks perfectly with Sunday's light show.
"With the commercialization of space, we see more strange features in the sky related to launches and, of course, to basically materials that come down," Stil explained.
In other words, we're going to be seeing more of this. The skies above Alberta are getting busier, and occasionally, the universe's version of a delivery truck drops a flaming package on its way through.
Missed It? Don't Worry, There's More Coming
If you were inside doom-scrolling instead of gazing skyward on Sunday, mark your calendar for December 13th. The Geminid meteor shower should put on a proper show, and those ones are the real deal — actual space rocks burning up, not discarded rocket parts.
Though honestly? There's something weirdly poetic about watching a piece of human engineering come home in a blaze of glory. We shot it into space, and months later, it gave us all a free light show on a crisp November evening.
Not a bad trade.
