This is a capture of a bright but brief meteor or "bolide" as it streaked toward Taurus. The meteor exploded as it streaked down the sky, leaving a yellowish "smoke" or ionization trail in its wake, that then drifted and dispersed. This was on the morning of September 28, 2024.

The yellow colour of the ionization trail comes from the meteor exciting a layer of sodium high in the atmosphere, at an altitude of 80-105 km and that is just 5 km thick. The sodium is deposited in the atmosphere by meteors like this. So meteors both contribute to the layer but also excite it to make it visible. High-altitude winds dispersed the ionized trail, in this case in directions which changed with altitude — to blow to the right higher up, but in the opposite direction to the left lower down the meteor streak.

Astronomers make use of the sodium layer by shooting laser beams into it to create artificial guide stars for the purpose of reducing the blurring effects of the atmosphere through adaptive optics on large observatory telescopes.

The Pleiades star cluster is to the left of the meteor, with the Hyades cluster below it. The bright object at bottom is Jupiter, then in Taurus. To the left of Jupiter are the stars of Auriga and its trio of Messier star clusters M36, M37, and M38. The magenta streak at left is the California Nebula, NGC 1499, in Peresus. At top are the star clusters Messier 34 in Perseus and NGC 752 in Andromeda.

Technical:
This is a stitch of two segments taken as part of a horizon-to-zenith Milky Way panorama at Bryce Canyon National Park, though with just the top segment containing the meteor. The bottom segment contained more of the constellation of Taurus for context.

It was fortunate that the meteor occured within the 1-minute exposure and not just as the exposure was beginning or ending, as that would have cut off the meteor streak.

An additional frame taken immediately after the meteor frame was also layered in, as it contained more of the ioniz