Shortly after midnight, the sky did one of those things that are usually talked about the next day with the phone in hand and the air of someone who has to convince others that they really saw something. In the night between 23 and 24 April 2026at 00:46 local timea very bright fireball crossed Liguria, cutting the darkness over the coast from east to west. A short, violent passage, intense enough to be seen even from very far away: Tuscany, Piedmont, southern France, up to the areas of Marseille And Grenoble. For a few seconds the sky stopped being a background and became an event. Then the darkness closed again, as it always does, leaving behind the usual mixture of amazement, blurry videos, nightly messages and people looking for a decent explanation the next morning.
The explanation came from the cross-work between visual observers and scientific instruments. The fireball in Liguria it was documented by the national network PRISMcoordinated by the National Institute of Astrophysics, together with the French network FRIPON. The all-sky camera installed at the hotel also played an important role Monte Viseggi Science Parkabove La Spezia, where the Istituto Culturale Astrofili Spezzini has been carrying out observation and study activities on asteroids for almost thirty years. The first visual reports came from amateur astronomers Valeria Gnarini And Lorenzo Nataliwhich allowed us to quickly start checking the data and comparing images, testimonies and instrumental recordings. Official analyzes indicate that the event was recorded by 12 stations5 Italian and 7 French, a coverage large enough to precisely reconstruct the atmospheric trajectory and orbit of the original body.
That flash seen from the Ligurian coast has become a scientific case
The brightness of the phenomenon explains the outcry. The fireball reached a apparent magnitude of about -13a value comparable to that of the full Moon. Translated without giving humans outside the labs break out in hives: it was really, really bright. Enough to be noticed over a huge stretch of territory, enough to end up in the recordings of scientific cameras and local webcams, enough to become a matter of analysis and not just wonder. The images show an almost straight trajectory, a clear trail, a glow capable of illuminating for a few moments even the landscape below and the surface of the sea.
The body that entered the atmosphere had nature asteroid and belonged to the orbital class of Apollo asteroidsobjects whose orbit can cross that of the Earth. The estimated speed is approx 30 kilometers per secondthat is, more than 100 thousand kilometers per hour, a figure that alone is enough to remind us how uncomfortable the word “space” is when it stops being in documentaries and starts to touch the atmosphere. Precisely this speed allowed experts to exclude the connection with the meteor shower Lyridsactive at this time of year, because Lyrid meteors usually enter the atmosphere at higher speeds, around 45 kilometers per second. The Ligurian racing car came from another story.
The passage closed at the top, approximately 50 kilometers altitudewhere the body completely disintegrated. No fragments reached the ground, so no meteorite hunt, no space stone to look for in the bushes with an Indiana Jones look on Sunday. The very simple formula remains this: asteroid body yes, meteorites on the ground zero. A small distinction only in appearance, because in astronomy words count. A meteor it is the luminous phenomenon produced when a fragment of an asteroid or comet enters the Earth’s atmosphere at very high speed. A fireball it is a particularly bright meteor. A meteorite it is what remains of the body when a part survives the journey through the atmosphere and reaches the ground. Here the journey stopped first.
The physics of the phenomenon has little that is romantic and much that is brutal. The fragment enters the atmosphere, compresses the air in front of it, heats it, heats up, vaporizes material, ionizes the column of air along the trajectory and produces that light that from the Earth appears like a sudden blade in the sky. We call it a shooting star when we want easy wishes and soft words. Astronomers, with less poetry and more utility, talk about meteoroids, meteors, bolides and meteorites. In between there are fragments of comets and asteroids, remnants of ancient processes, material that travels through space until it meets the Earth and is consumed in a few seconds.
The room PRISM of the Monte Viseggi Science Park belongs to a national network of all-sky cameras designed to monitor the night sky continuously. They are instruments that seem to do a simple thing, look up, and instead collect precious data: they record the passage of the fireballs, help calculate their trajectory, allow the body’s original orbit to be estimated and, in the right cases, also indicate any areas of meteorite fall. PRISM, acronym for First Italian Network for the Systematic Surveillance of Meteors and Atmosphereis coordinated by INAF and today has over 80 all-sky cameras, with a community made up of research bodies, universities, schools, amateur astronomers’ groups and local entities.
The Ligurian case shows well the meaning of a similar network. The single flash, seen with the naked eye, remains an experience. The same flash, taken from multiple locations, measured, compared, placed in a trajectory, becomes scientific information. The difference is all there: in the transition from “I saw it” to “we can reconstruct it”. The Monte Viseggi camera made a contribution within this broader mosaic, together with the Italian and French stations, the local images, the citizens’ reports, the amateur astronomers who had the readiness and competence to treat the show as data to be saved.
The Monte Viseggi Science Park has a long history. The “Luciano Zannoni” astronomical observatory, which dominates La Spezia, was inaugurated in 1989 by Margherita Hack; in the 1990s improvements were made to the optics to develop digital photography and study asteroids. After a difficult period, the structure was relaunched by the La Spezia amateur astronomers, with the renovation of the park, the premises and the instrumentation. Today that place retains a very concrete function: observing, recording, teaching, participating in larger networks without losing local roots.
