At the same time, real estate agent Kevin Wagg was walking on Marine Parade near Bay Skate.
“When I first saw it I thought I could see a big hunk of something,” he said.
Thinking it was a plane, Wagg opened tracking app Flightradar, but it showed nothing flying nearby.
Wagg snapped a photo before the object disappeared behind the horizon and saw the contrail left behind.
He estimated the object was visible for 10 to 15 seconds.
The mysterious object as seen from Marine Parade in Napier. Photo / Kevin Wagg
“It must have been quite big,” he said.
“It must have just come into the atmosphere and it just lit up so that you couldn’t see what the actual item was.
“It was actually going slower than what I thought it should be going, so I think it might have been actually a long way away and it looked like it was heading towards the Chatham Islands.”
Wagg said he had seen several meteors fly over Napier before, but this didn’t look like one to him.
Fireballs Aotearoa citizen scientist Steve Wyn-Harris said the fact people had time to get out their cameras means it was too slow for a meteor or fireball.
“The most likely explanation at this stage is that it is space junk re-entering [the atmosphere] or a satellite burning up,” he said.
Bruce Ngataierua, director at Hawke’s Bay Holt Planetarium, agreed it was probably space junk if it was slow enough to be filmed.
Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke’s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in the UK, Germany, and New Zealand.