Great balls of fire! A Largs man has given an amazing description of a meteor sighting as it flashed across the night sky.

The burning space rock was zooming northwards at a great speed, and the Largs man who saw the astonishing sight, likened it to the Chelyabinsk meteor over Russia which made headlines around the world two years ago.

George Kerr, who lives in Woodcroft Avenue, contacted the ‘News’ after reading an astronomy article last week about Comet Lovejoy, and said that he witnessed the remarkable sight above his home on 10 January.

George said: “It was a massive cinder, and there was smoke emanating from it. It was blue smoke - it had shot up from the Hunterston/Kilmarnock direction and went right up over my house heading for Greenock.

“It was like the one in Russia. I got a great view of it - it was like looking into Santa’s Grotto.

“I have asked about but given the time in the morning it was, I might have been the only one who has seen it. When you see something like this flying through the sky, you can believe that the dinosaurs were wiped out by something like this. It was incredible. I could see right inside it and the blue smoke was not gushing out of it, it was just trickling. There were flames fluttering inside it, and it was glowing red. It was around about 100-200 feet in size, and 50-100 feet in diamater and it was just above the Largs hills.” Reporter Calum Corral, who writes an astronomy column in our free publicaton, the Largs and Millport Advertiser, commented: “If you look online, it is clear that meteors are not entirely uncommon above the sky throughout the UK. However, if you are lucky enough to see one, it must be an amazing sight, although what George witnessed would have been much smaller in scale than the Chelyabinsk meteor. If you go to ‘VirtualAstro’ on Twitter, you can see regular updates of meteor sightings across the UK. In fact, there was a sighting mentioned on their Twitter page last Saturday evening. As ever, keep your eyes on the skies!” In February 2013, the Chelyabinks meteor blast over central Russia glowed 30 times brighter than the sun according to scientists, injuring about 1,500 people, and damaged thousands of buildings in central Russia.