From Chelyabinsk to Cuba: The meteor connection (earthsky.org)

By EarthSky Voices in Earth | Space | February 15, 2019

On February 1, 2019, a bright meteor crossed the sky over Cuba in the middle of the day. The phenomenon, followed by a smoke trail (a characteristic cloud left by a meteor burning up in the atmosphere) and a sonic boom, was witnessed by thousands of locals and tourists in the region of Pinar del Rio (western side of the island).

Almost at the same time of the impact, a cruise ship was leaving Havana Harbor and on board, Rachel Cook, an American tourist and vlogger, was making a timelapse of the undocking process. Without knowing it, she was recording one of the few videos known to date of the falling meteor. Meanwhile, about 250 miles (400 km) away, in Ft. Myers, Florida, a webcam of the EarthCam network was filming the midday activities on the beach. Luckily, the camera was aimed in the right direction to record the meteor.

Just a couple of minutes after the event, social networks, especially Instagram and Twitter, received a flood of dozens of videos and pictures taken from Cuba, most of them showing the smoke trail left by the meteor. One of those videos was particularly interesting. It was recorded in one of the main streets of the city of Pinar del Rio, and showed dozens of people in the street contemplating the remnant cloud in awe (see the video here). Although the video does not show the meteor, it was full of details about the place and time when it was recorded.
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A week after the Cuba meteor event, and almost exactly six years after the February 15, 2013, Chelyabinsk impact, the same Colombian scientific team, again using information available on the internet, applied their methods to reconstruct the trajectory of the Cuban meteor. Their results are reported in a scientific paper. Read the preprint here. Zuluaga explained: