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The best videos of the Chelyabinsk meteor

This morning, Russians in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 950 miles east of Moscow, were jolted awake when a meteor exploded in the sky, producing shockwaves that shattered windows, set off car alarms, and injured at least 500 people. The meteor was traveling at 19 miles per second, according to Russian authorities, before exploding mid-air, likely ...

By Elias Groll

February 15, 2013, 3:58 PM

This morning, Russians in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 950 miles east of Moscow, were jolted awake when a meteor exploded in the sky, producing shockwaves that shattered windows, set off car alarms, and injured at least 500 people. The meteor was traveling at 19 miles per second, according to Russian authorities, before exploding mid-air, likely as a result of the immense heat generated as a large object speeds through the atmosphere.

On the ground in Chelyabinsk, Russians witnessed a scene that must have seemed ripped out of an apocalyptic film, as a bright, flaming object suddenly appeared in the sky, streaked across the horizon, and unleashed a bone-rattling shockwave. The extraordinary developments were captured on video, in part through the automobile dash-cams that are nearly ubiquitous in Russia.

Below, we’ve compiled a selection of some of the best videos of the meteor shower, along with translations of the reactions of the stunned Russians on the ground.

At 1:40, the speaker says that there was an extremely bright flash going across the sky. Once the blast can be heard he says, "What the hell? … Something fell. Do you hear? You know what that was? It was supersonic. It must have been an asteroid, and that’s the blast wave." At 2:38, the speaker exclaims, "What the fuck?" They look at the broken windows and say it’s like something out of the war. Then, another speaker says, "It must have been a rocket or something." While they’re cursing up a storm, one of his friends says, "It must have been the Chinese!"

The video below gives a sense of the magnitude of the blast’s shockwave.

This video, shot across the border from Kazakhstan about 200 miles from Chelyabinsk, shows how far from the city the meteoroid could be seen.

The blast blew out windows in Chelyabinsk. The closed-circuit video below gives a sense of how many Chelyabinsk residents likely experienced the meteoroid.

This video of a street in Chelyabinsk, which doesn’t capture the direct path of the meteoroid, shows how the meteoroid lit up the street, casting a veritable klieg light on an entire city block.

This video compilation shows how residents experienced the meteroid across the city, and includes footage from a Chelyabinsk school right after the explosion was felt on the ground.