Watch: UK meteor lights up night sky with ‘huge flash’

This is the moment a meteor known as a fireball lit up skies across the UK with a “huge flash”.

Brits captured footage and pictures of the large meteor as it blazed across the sky shortly before 10pm on Sunday.

Social media users said they spotted the phenomenon in areas such as London, Manchester, Cardiff, Bath, Milton Keynes and Ireland.

The UK Meteor Network, a group of amateur astronomers who use a network of meteor detection cameras to monitor the sky, said they received more than 120 reports of Sunday’s meteor.

“From the two videos we saw it was a slow moving meteor with clearly visible fragmentation,” said the group on Twitter.

One Twitter user wrote: "Anyone else see the #meteor burn up over the UK just before 10pm tonight?

“I first thought it was a bright star or plane, then it got bigger & faster, then a huge flash lit up the sky & it burst into a massive tail of orange sparks trailing behind like a giant firework! So cool!"

Another person from south London said they saw two flashes and a green light streak back and forth at their window.

“I thought someone was targetting me with a laser and I ran out of [the] kitchen and turned off the light. Terrified,” they said.

According to Nasa, fireballs are exceptionally bright meteors that are bright enough to be seen over a very wide area.

A fireball meteor will reach a visual magnitude of -3 or brighter when seen at from the observer’s point of view.

Brighter objects will have lower visual magnitude numbers. For example, the moon has a visual magnitude of -12.7 and the sun is -26.7.

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