Incredible moment ‘fireball’ meteor shoots across night sky above New Jersey stunning stargazers

INCREDIBLE video shows the moment a “fireball” meteor shot across the sky in New Jersey over the weekend – leaving stargazers stunned.

The meteor shot through the sky around 7.15pm on Sunday and was likely part of a that occurred throughout the northeastern .

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Meteorologist Chad Shafer, of the National Weather Service's Mount Holly Station, he was driving in when he saw the large, white fireball. 

"This was easily the biggest (meteor) I’ve seen," Shafer said, adding its tail looked like it was shooting flames. 

New Jersey resident Daniel Powell told a reporter for the outlet via that: "At first it looked like a typical shooting star but lasted significantly longer and got much brighter as it descended.”

"It got very close to the horizon before it broke up, about the height of where an overpass would be in your windshield from about 200 meters away.

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“Then it broke up in a shower of sparks,” Powell said. “For a few seconds before that I was worried it might be a possible earth impact."

The Lakewood Scoop of the meteor as it blasted across the Garden State sky.

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The it received more than 280 reports about the meteors, mainly from people in and .

The society said it also received reports in Canada, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Vermont, and Rhode Island. 

The group, which tracks meteors, said online that “several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth’s atmosphere each day.”

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“The vast majority” of those that happen occur over oceans and uninhabited regions, therefore “a good many are masked by daylight.”

The meteors that happen at night “stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them.”

AMS said that “the brighter the fireball, the more rare is the event” – and said only about one-third as many fireballs “present for each successively brighter magnitude class, following an exponential decrease.”