Early this morning, June 2nd just before 4 a.m. MST, a small asteroid hit Earth's atmosphere and exploded over Arizona. "There was a bright flash and the ground shook from the explosion," reports Chris Schur of Payson AZ, who says the flash of light was about 10x brighter than a full Moon. The explosion actually blinded a NASA camera located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins, Arizona:
the complete [six second movie] movie ... The fact that the explosion saturated most cameras that saw it initially complicated analysts' efforts to pinpoint its nature and origin.
Schur missed photographing the explosion itself, but "we were able to get images soon after of the smoke train from this object." Here it is, twisting in the winds of the upper atmosphere before sunrise:
