Although right now California’s north coast is engulfed in thick fog, most times of darkness here lately have been near-crystal clear, hence a couple of near-locals had the opportunity to spy some fascinating remnants off Friday night’s meteor pop seen most-brightly over the Bay Area.

Via probably the best news source hereabouts, The Lost Coast Outpost, and a description of the flaming space rock from a witness in south Humboldt County:

We had just driven home and were relaxing. I saw it. It took a second to process. It was a green glowing orb…lime green with white sparks. The tail was whiter. It had quite a tail… Most shooting stars were like white streaks. This had the look of a skyrocket but it was higher and it was quieter. From east to west across the sky. [It] covered half the sky that I have visible. This was pretty large like a baseball….The lime green ball was tossing off sparks kinda like a firework… Spectacular!

I’d say, if I’d seen it.

(Illustration found here).

In the comments section: Was standing on my deck in Arcata between 7;15 and 8:40, happened to look up and saw the burning streak.
Another comment-view: I saw this! Who do I report it to? I was driving southbound on 101 just leaving Eureka at about 745pm, my son and I both saw it.
(Both posted this afternoon).

Eureka is about 10 miles south, and Arcata is a little near-village along the coast about five miles south of where I live — home to Humboldt State University.

And we’re not alone — the flaming droplets from space apparently even extends to Cuba, where fragments, or something, exploded overhead there last Tuesday:

In a video from a state TV newscast posted on the website CubaSi late Friday, unidentified residents of the central city of Rodas, near Cienfuegos, said the explosion was impressive.
“On Tuesday we left home to fish around five in the afternoon, and around 8:00 we saw a light in the heavens and then a big ball of fire, bigger than the sun,” one local man said in the video.
“My home shook completely,” said a woman.
“I had never heard such a strange thing.”

Some info and some nail-biting from Wired:

Scientists call such space debris near-Earth objects (NEOs) and have observed nearly 10,000 of them since NASA started using telescope tracking in 1995, according to NASA’s NEO program website.
This program spends all of its time scanning the skies for possible threats to earth and its orbit; unfortunately this amount of time still only covers about 5 percent of the sky.
This is why certain objects are found ahead of time and others completely surprise us, sometimes in the same day! Once discovered, NASA generally tracks NEOs that range in size from one to approximately two kilometers in diameter and continually orbit the Earth, some closer than others.
You might wonder why NASA doesn’t just monitor more of the sky.
Simple, they don’t have the resources.
Only about 0.05 percent of NASA’s budget is allocated to the NEO program and NASA’s current budget is only 0.4 percent of the entire United States’ budget.
This means that one fiftieth of one percent of the entire US budget is allocated to finding these potential “doomsday” threats to our planet.
Expanding this search program is just one of the many reasons that NASA funding needs to be significantly increased.

No shit. And our run-down weather satellite-systems need an upgrade, while you’re at it!