A fireball was seen streaking across the lower North Island sky last night, with some reporting they heard a “huge boom”.
Talula Hodder captured the fireball on her dashcam as she was driving home from Palmerston North to Levin.
“It was a fully clear night otherwise, so I was like, wait, what was that? Then the next second, this massive flaming fireball thing came tearing across the sky,” she told 1News.
“I was like, ‘holy s***’… I was quite freaked out.”
Hodder said the glow “just flooded the sky” and described a “slight sizzling sound” and a “boom” to go with it.
Fireballs Aotearoa, the public face of a citizen camera network monitoring meteors, said it received multiple reports of a “bright fireball meteor” over the lower North Island at around 10.26pm.
It shared a video from Toatoa in rural Ōpōtiki, Bay of Plenty, with a similar yellow glow falling from the sky.
Steve Wyn-Harris of Fireballs Aotearoa was in his spa pool when the sky lit up behind his house.
“There was a big flash, and then another flash,” he told 1News. I thought it must be lightning”.
It was when his phone started buzzing that Wyn-Harris realised he’d witnessed a fireball.
He said data collected by the cameras was still being analysed, but there were some exciting possibilities.
Wyn-Harris said the fact people heard the fireball “tells us that it got low enough into the upper atmosphere to potentially drop a meteorite or meteorites onto the ground”.
Once analysis is done, “we will have a much clearer idea whether this meteoroid got low enough and slow enough to stop burning up, go into dark flight, and also where it might have landed”.
He said there was a “rough idea” of where it may have landed, but could not share any details until there was more data.
Followers commented on the Facebook post, sharing what they saw.
“It was so big and bright it looked like it was right outside our window! Gave us a hell of a fright,” one person in central Hawke’s Bay said.
A person north of Tūrangi wrote: “It was huge, the ball was orange with a purple tail. We could see black soot coming off it. It appeared to crash very close to the east of us.”
Others reported seeing it as far north as Auckland.
Some said they heard a boom when the fireball first lit up the sky.
“Wondered what the noise was, like someone hit a wheelie bin with a stone,” a commenter from Ruby Bay in Tasman wrote.
“Our household heard a huge boom right about that time,” another said.
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