An extremely bright meteor streaked across the Western sky, creating a a lot of buzz in the scientific world and a memorable experience for people who saw it.

One of the lucky few was Dayton resident Della Wood, who was driving home last night when suddenly the night sky lit up in front of her.

"I saw this amzing orange colored shooting star," she says. "Then it just seemed to grow and as it grew it got this amazing beautiful trail behind it of green and blue color and I saw it hit behind the mountain and when it hit it just lit up the sky."

What Wood saw was an exceptionally bright meteor, a fireball.

"They are not that rare and they are definitely not threatening, but meteor fireballs sightings are really impressive," says Dan Ruby, the associate director of the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada.

A surveillance camera at the University of Utah observatory south of Salt Lake City captured the meteor as is streaked to Earth. It shows pretty much what Della Woods described.

"It looks like a shooting star on steroids," says Seth Jarvis of the Clark Planetairum in Salt Lake City.

It's likely the fireball was associated with the Leonid Meteor shower, an annual collision between the Earth and a dust cloud left by Comet Tempel Tuttle which visits our area of the solar system every 33 years.

The Fleischmann Planetarium has a variety of these pieces of space debris on display including a one ton piece of the Quinn Canyon Meteorite discovered near Tonopah a hundred years ago, but Ruby says most of the meteors we see are mere grains of sand, no bigger than the head of a pin.

But, he says, when they hit the earth's atmosphere at 80-thousand miles an hour or so, they can make a spectacular show.

"What we're seeing when we see the trail of a meteor zipping across the sky is actually ionizing the atmosphere, just ripping those molecules apart when we see that glow fo the gas in our atmosphere."

University of Utah scientists say this particular meteor may have been as large as an oven, but likely broke apart before it hit the earth.

They plan to study the video to estimate its size and trajectory. So, the scientists will study, filing away the results to add to what we know about meteors, but last night's sight is something a lucky few like Della Wood will remember for the rest of her life.

"I'm at a loss for words," she says."The way it lit up the sky. It was awesome."