Good description!

It definitely sounds like you saw a small but bright
meteor. It may have been headed approximately toward
you, and/or it may have exploded. I've never seen a
meteor break apart or explode, so I think that's fairly
rare.

I've seen a few really bright green meteors, and they
also lasted only about a second.

My guess is that the meteoroid was about the size of a
marble. The majority of visible meteors are only about
the size of a small pea. Anything much smaller than
that isn't visible. Anything much larger than a marble
would probably last longer than the meteor you saw.
I think the Peekskill meteor was visible for a minute
or longer. The biggest and longest-lasting meteor I've
ever heard about, by far, is one that was seen in the
middle of the day on August 10, 1972. A bright meteor
was seen and photographed from Utah to Alberta, Canada.
The meteoroid, estimated to be the size of a house, or
larger, is the only one known to enter and then leave
Earth's atmosphere. Good thing that it didn't hit the
ground, because it could easily have wiped out a whole
city. It was visible for about 20 minutes.

I asked about your location and the direction you were
looking because I thought there was a possibility that
you saw a rocket launch from Vandenberg AFB. Your
description of the object rules that out.

The first time I saw a bright meteor I wanted to get
some kind of confirmation from an astronomer, too.
My dad didn't know a lot about astronomy, but he knew
that astronomers don't try to keep track of every bright
meteor, and suggested to me that my expectation was a
bit unrealistic. There are only a few places that have
cameras watching the sky all night long, in hopes of
imaging a fireball and then using the images to find a
meteorite on the ground. The Cloudbait Observatory in
Colorado is one. I don't know whether the technique has
worked for anyone, yet.

You could look on the Griffith Observatory website for
info about asking questions. I'd guess that they get an
awful lot of questions, and don't have time to answer all
of them, but they may be putting Q & A online now.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis