A fireball was seen streaking across the lower North Island sky last night, with some reporting they heard a “huge boom”. <\/p>\n
Talula Hodder captured the fireball on her dashcam as she was driving home from Palmerston North to Levin. <\/p>\n
“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. <\/p>\n
“I was like, ‘holy s***’… I was quite freaked out.” <\/p>\n
Hodder said the glow “just flooded the sky” and described a “slight sizzling sound” and a “boom” to go with it. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
It shared a video from Toatoa in rural \u014cp\u014dtiki, Bay of Plenty, with a similar yellow glow falling from the sky. <\/p>\n
Steve Wyn-Harris of Fireballs Aotearoa was in his spa pool when the sky lit up behind his house. <\/p>\n
“There was a big flash, and then another flash,” he told 1News. I thought it must be lightning”. <\/p>\n
It was when his phone started buzzing that Wyn-Harris realised he’d witnessed a fireball. <\/p>\n
He said data collected by the cameras was still being analysed, but there were some exciting possibilities. <\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0it might have landed”. <\/p>\n
He said there was a “rough idea” of where it may have landed, but could not share any details until there was more data. <\/p>\n
Followers commented on the Facebook post, sharing what they saw. <\/p>\n
“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. <\/p>\n
A person north of T\u016brangi 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.”<\/p>\n
Others reported seeing it as far north as Auckland. <\/p>\n
Some said they heard a boom when the fireball first lit up the sky.<\/p>\n
“Wondered what the noise was, like someone hit a wheelie bin with a stone,” a commenter from Ruby Bay in Tasman wrote. <\/p>\n
“Our household heard a huge boom right about that time,” another said. <\/p>\n
The morning’s headlines in 90 seconds, including a powerful quake hits Japan, Winston Peters lashes out at the Greens, and a shark bite caught on camera. (Source: 1News)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A fireball was seen streaking across the lower North Island sky last night, with some reporting they heard…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69,392],"class_list":["post-548635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}