Fireball Program
Since 2005, the American Meteor Society (AMS) has accepted online reports of suspected fireballs from the general public. The Fireball Report online form guides you through describing what you saw in a way that provides useful information to astronomers studying meteors. The information you provide can be combined with that of other eye-witnesses to give a good estimate of the trajectory of the fireball, and to help determine if a ground fall occurred. All reports are analyzed, evaluated, and grouped into events based on the location of the witnesses and the time of the sighting.
The Fireball events are published on the IMO Website, the AMS website and the customized websites of all the 23 organizations world-wide involved in this project:
Here are some numbers (on January, 1st 2019) – The program received 157,925 reports from 186 different countries since 2005. These reports have been grouped into 38,713 events.
A large team of IMO volunteers has been hard at work translating the Fireball Report Form into more than 30 languages, and the IMO is now busy publicising it to local astronomical societies and observing groups around the world. Large fireball events often excite local media; if such an event happens in your region you can help by telling people about the form so that they can report what they saw.
