Astronaut watches a meteor explode over Earth in a bright green fireball in stunning video from ISS

A new video from an astronaut's vantage point in space catures a bright green burst over Earth as a meteor exploded in the night sky.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, commander of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission, shared a new time-lapse of photos taken from the International Space Station as it passed over Cairo, Egypt. While aiming to photograph the Milky Way's Core, Dominick ended up capturing a bright green fireball that exploded on Monday (Sept. 2) at 8:12 p.m. EDT (2012 GMT).

The outburst seen in the time-lapse was created by a meteor that entered Earth's atmosphere and burned up. Dominick shared the new view in a post on X (formally Twitter) on Sept. 3.

"I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought," Dominick wrote in his post. "They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — a rather bright one called a bolide."

Dominick shared two versions of the timelapse. In his initial post, the timelapse was slowed down to one frame per second, offering a more detailed view of the fleeting meteor as it streaked across the sky and then exploded. In the comments, Dominick shared a faster version, in which the meteor appears as only a very brief flash in the top right of the frame.

Related: Asteroid 10 times bigger than the dinosaur-killing space rock smashed Jupiter's largest moon off its axis

Given the exceptional brightness of the meteor, it is considered a bolide, which is a large meteor that explodes in Earth's atmosphere with enough force to create a sonic boom. This type of meteor can last several seconds, or even minutes, and create a bright glow across the sky that outshines the stars and moon.