Car dash-cam video captures green meteor streaking across Vancouver night sky

Dashcam video captures meteor Lawrence Bau captured a meteor streaking across the Vancouver night sky via car dashcam video. (Courtesy: Lawrence Bau)

It had been an ordinary Friday evening, driving to meet family for dinner, when Lawrence Bau witnessed something in the night sky unlike anything he had seen before.

A jet of vivid green light that appeared only for a moment, before disappearing as instantly as it had materialised.

“I thought I saw something in the sky in my peripheral vision,” he said. “It was a short streak, quite obvious. I knew it was a shooting star of sorts, and so I made a wish.”

Having just received the news that two good friends were pregnant and preparing to welcome children in the New Year, Bau said he wished they both would have healthy and happy babies.

“It was the first thing on my mind,” he said.

Bau had been travelling alone southbound on Granville Street, around the West 49th Avenue intersection, when the meteor passed by Earth and lit up the night.

While it had seemed brief in person, video captured from his car’s dash cam, reviewed by Bau and his family over dinner, had shown the streak to be much longer, he said.

“It’s amazing to have the video to look at and to keep, to be able to be at the right place at the right time, and facing the right direction, is just amazing.”

Family had thought the video was “really cool,” and had jokingly begun speculating whether something more extraterrestrial was at play, he said.

“There were a lot of jokes about aliens,” laughed Bau.

The 38-year-old lawyer, from Vancouver, said while he is no more interested in astronomy than the average person, he does find the displays that Vancouver is so frequently gifted “magical.”

An attempt to view the recent Orionid meteor shower that lit up the skies in October proved unsuccessful, but his sorrow over the anticlimactic moment was immediately forgotten when he witnessed the vivid hues of aurora borealis the same month, he said. To then go on to witness a blazing green fireball on top of that made the experience all the more richer, Bau added.

“Now this is my first big shooting star. I have always wished that I could cross that off my bucket list, and with the aurora caught earlier this year, that just makes it all even more incredible,” he said.

“It's fun to look up and see the celestial bodies, and realise how small we are in the cosmos.”