Goodness Gracious

Another great ball of fire to report - via the Washington Post:

The "great ball of fire" that lighted the Sunday night sky -- and then lighted up police switchboards across several mid-Atlantic states -- almost certainly was a big chunk of space junk falling from orbit.

Everyone seemed to think it was falling near them. Callers to 911 said it was "a rocket or comet" or maybe "a plane or helicopter on fire" that was of a "greenish color" that came "down from the sky near the tree line."

[...]

Geoff Chester, at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, had the answer. He's fairly certain that it was the second-stage booster from a Russian Soyuz rocket that took off on Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.