A large flash that lit up the night sky over much of New Zealand was captured by a live feed camera and has prompted speculation it could have been a meteor.
The bright light was seen by people facing south about 11.25pm on Friday night, and travelled from east to west on an almost horizontal trajectory.
A PredictWind.com live feed camera at the Heretaunga Boating Club, facing over Wellington Harbour from Petone, captured the 'shooting star'.
It showed a circle of light with a long bright tail behind it entering view over the Eastern Hutt Hills from about a 10 o'clock bearing. The head of light then flared brightly to a much bigger size - producing a wider and brighter trail behind it and at least two small bursts of light directly below it - then disappeared, leaving the brightest part of the trail to fade slowly.
"I live in Petone and it lit up my room," one person said on a Lower Hutt Facebook group.
"I saw it in Tītahi Bay," another person said. "From my point of view it looked like a green line shooting across the sky," another said, while someone further south said they "saw it just before Seddon on the South Island.".
Seen from the Petone camera. Photo: Supplied/ PredictWind.com
Several social media commenters asked if it could have been a meteor.
"Watched from my window in Ngaio. Most fantastic streak of blue/teal. Would have burnt up in the atmosphere," a Redditor said.
"We caught this on our All Sky Meteor Camera Array located in Greendale," Canterbury Astronomical Society president Simon Lewis told RNZ.
"The east cameras caught this long-lasting and very bright fireball. The smoke trail lasted over five minutes."
Meteor camera network Fireballs Aotearoa said it was a busy sky on Friday night.
The first fireball could be seen over Manawatū-Whanganui at 10pm, and the second over Wellington at 11.30pm.
A few seconds later - from the Petone camera. Photo: Supplied/ PredictWind.com
"A fireball is what we would call in common language, a shooting star, or a meteor is the correct term, and a fireball is a large meteor," Steve Wyn-Harris from Fireballs Aotearoa said.
"Most shooting stars that we see are small grains of sand, coming into the upper atmosphere and burning up.
"But sometimes a big rock comes in, and when it does, that becomes a big meteor - or a fireball."
A MetService spokesperson said sometimes their weather monitoring does pick up things like this, but in this case, while forecasters had checked their radars and other monitoring systems on Friday night, nothing had showed up.
Wyn-Harris said it was possible the fireball had become meteorites - fragments of rock that land on Earth - if it had come in low enough.
"Fireball can produce [meteorites] ... sometimes when they get low enough, down to about 20 to 25 kilometres above the earth and slow enough, they come in 17 kilometres a second. But when they get down to three kilometres a second, they stop burning up - and then can drop a rock onto the ground, which becomes a meteorite."
Fireballs Aotearoa wanted to hear from anyone who had heard a sonic boom, which would indicate the meteor was low.
While there are only three or four meteorites per year, Wyn-Harris said it was common to see fireballs over New Zealand.
"On our cameras, we probably see a fireball most nights.
"Perhaps not quite as spectacular as the one that people have seen last night, but there's large meteors coming in all the time.
"They tend to burn up high up, and put on a nice little display, and then fizzle out - burn out."
There was also a rocket re-entry over the Pacific Ocean later in the night, about 1.30am, he said.
The International Meteor Organisation posted online that data from US Space Force indicated space debris had been observed re-entering the atmosphere 800km south of New Zealand, about 1.39am NZT(12.39pm UTC).
That was from a "massive (11 tons) second stage of a Chinese rocket, launched on December 3, 2025," they said.
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