Airplane Camera Catches Meteor Streaking Across North American Sky

An airplane pilot had a sensational bird's-eye view of a meteor streaking across the night sky of the eastern U.S. and Canada this weekend.

Mike Grossman was flying his light Piper Archer aircraft 1,500 feet above the Hudson River near New York City at 6:16 p.m. on Saturday when the fireball suddenly came into view.

Footage filmed by a GoPro camera attached to Grossman's plane shows the meteor plummeting toward the horizon. It can be seen in the upper-right section of the GIF below, just above the plane.

More than 560 people, most of them in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, have reported seeing the meteor, according to the American Meteor Society.

People in Virginia, Washington, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, Delaware, Ohio, Kentucky and even Ontario have seen it as well.

Motorist Alex Salvador captured the fireball on his car's dashboard camera while driving through Falls Church, Virginia. That footage can be seen below.

"Startling. Even unnerving, maybe" is how Salvador described the sight to ABC News. "It seemed close, big and definitely on fire with a tail."

Adrian Burns was driving in Lancaster, Ohio, when he obtained similar footage of the meteor.

In November, a security camera caught a meteor hurtling through the Ohio sky just days after a driver in Thailand captured this spectacular dashcam footage of a "fireball meteor" -- a term used to refer to extremely bright meteors.

Several thousand fireball meteors occur in the Earth's atmosphere every day, according to the American Meteor Society. But people rarely see them because they often take place over oceans or during the day.

This article previously included another embedded video of the meteor, which was made unavailable by the originating account. The embedded video and an accompanying description have been removed.

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