Residents from around the Sacramento area spotted a fireball Sunday night as it streaked across the skies over Northern California.
Nearly 240 sightings of the meteor were reported just after 8 p.m. Sunday over California, Arizona and Nevada by the American Meteor Society, its officials said. The celestial event was captured around the capital region and elsewhere on home security and doorbell cameras.
In California, people reported a bright flash visible from Sacramento to the Bay Area and Central Coast, as well as the southern San Joaquin Valley and eastern Sierra, according to the society, which shared videos of the event on its website.
Web cameras at University of California’s Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton also captured the speeding meteor just before 8:20 p.m., UC officials said in a social media post.
A meteor is seen streaking across the sky from a dashcam in a vehicle driving on the Bayshore Freeway section of Highway 101 near Palo Alto on Sunday, March 22, 2026.
(Tobi Beetz via the American Meteor Society)
Witnesses and cameras allowed NASA and other skywatchers to compute the meteor’s trajectory, said NASA officials.
But officials at the space agency dismissed connections between Sunday night’s sighting and other recent and widely reported bright meteor events, including sightings in Ohio and Texas.
“This fireball does not appear to be related to recent bright meteors that have attracted widespread public attention, having a different radiant and speed,” William Cooke, Lead at NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, said in a statement.
The meteor was first located at an altitude of about 49 miles above the city of Chowchilla, Madera County, Cooke said. The meteor streaked across the sky at an estimated 35,000 mph in the southern sky.
The meteor traveled about 58 miles through the upper atmosphere before disintegrating 29 miles above tiny Calflax in unincorporated Fresno County, Cooke said.
A meteor that streaked across the skies of Northern California on Sunday, March 22, 2026, is seen in the bottom left corner of a image taken from the Lick Observatory’s SkyCam web camera on Mount Hamilton. The meteor was seen as a greenish streak across the Sacramento region.
(Lick Observatory)
The observatory later shared images from its SkyCam and HamCam2 cameras, showing the meteor as a greenish streak moving from north to south.