Before it lit up the Great Lakes, astronomers anticipated this spectacular fireball.

For just the sixth time in history, astronomers managed to spot a small asteroid shortly before it smacked into our planet in dramatic fashion.

A 2.3-foot-long (0.7-meter) asteroid was seen by David Rankin, an astronomer, in Arizona’s Mount Lemmon sky survey on Saturday.Even though it was on the verge of colliding with Earth, this was not a particularly large asteroids.It wasn’t big enough to be a big threat, but it was big enough to make quite a spectacle as it tore through the air.

Word went out immediately in the middle of the night through astronomy circles that impact was just hours away.

Although it is only the sixth asteroid that we anticipated, it was not the first that was observed prior to impact this year.Five of the six have been observed since 2014, which indicates how much the collective detection capability of astronomy has improved in recent years.In contrast to the other few that were observed prior to their fiery demise, this approaching asteroid, which is officially identified as 2022 WJ1, burned up over Canada’s largest city.

Over 100 witnesses reported seeing a bright fireball over the region around Lake Erie and the other Great Lakes at 3:26 a.m. local time (12:26 a.m. PT). It was even caught on camera buzzing behind the iconic CN Tower in Toronto.

“Check their yards and driveways for new black rocks, which could be meteorites,” say astronomers from Western University in Ontario to people who live along portions of the shoreline of Lake Ontario.

A number of researchers are already on the job scouring the shore for potential space chunk fragments.