“Caught a fireball on dashcam tonight while driving north towards the Portsmouth Traffic Circle! It was visible for FIVE seconds,” Wright, of South Berwick, Maine, wrote on Facebook. He timestamped the sighting as happening at 5:59 p.m. on Dec. 27.

A resident living near the traffic circle chimed in to say he and his wife had also witnessed the fireball.

“I live right off Coakley next to the Chevy dealer and my wife saw it as we were driving around the circle at about 6pm!!,” the person posted.

Still, the celestial event caught the attention of people throughout New England.

“I was on Rte 3 North in the Tyngsboro MA area and I saw it. To me it looked as if it was over Nashua NH, one thing I can say is it was heading straight toward the ground,” one user posted.

“Saw this in Portland Maine and thought I was hallucinating,” another posted.

It even caught the attention of those south of Boston.

“Was anyone else just driving down rt3 north between the old exit 3 and 5 and saw a crazy shooting star/ meteor/ comet? Thing was huge!,” Kristen Goodrich posted in the All Things Plymouth Facebook group.

Ken Mahan, lead meteorologist for the Boston Globe, said it appears New Englanders caught “the grand finale of the Geminid meteor shower before the year’s most prominent display of shooting stars exits out of view.”

The cluster of asteroid debris orbits the sun annually, with Earth entering the tail of the space dust in early December, Mahan said. They peaked this month from the 12th to the 14th, where up to 100 meteors per hour could be seen.

“The Geminid meteors are relatively larger than other meteor showers that we typically see,” he said. “These larger, denser meteors typically burn more slowly when they enter Earth’s outer atmosphere, resulting in fireballs that can flare brightly while the meteor burns up.”

The very end of the Geminids can linger across the Northern Hemisphere skies through Christmas, he added, and even into the last couple days of December.

Hayley Kaufman can be reached at hayley.kaufman@globe.com. Follow her @GlobeHayleyK. Ken Mahan can be reached at ken.mahan@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @kenmahantheweatherman.