A bright ball of light streaked across the sky Monday, treating stargazers from the East Coast to Canada to a show.

Marc Taylor, the planetarium manager at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, explains the phenomenon, which occurred around 6:30 p.m.

"There was a little rock or a piece of metal or something, which was orbiting the sun," says Taylor. "The Earth plowed into it, or they plowed into each other. When it hit the atmosphere, it burned up and it was big enough that as it burned up and broke up, people saw a sort of trail."

A dash-camera video of the meteor shot by a New Jersey motorist is only seconds long, but it has received thousands of hits on YouTube.

Some people reported seeing shades of bright blue, white or green in the meteor. That brilliant light is space debris, made up of iron, nickel and silicon.

If you missed Monday night's show, there is no way to predict when it will happen again.

"Every year, several thousand tons of debris rain down on the Earth," says Taylor. "Most of it is little tiny things, little tiny specks of rock and metal. Every now and then you get something bigger."