A large meteor sighted over the lower North Island this afternoon fell 23 years ago on the day of the country’s last significant meteor.
Just before 2 p.m., a meteor was observed in parts of the lower North Island, which is believed to be up to 1 meter wide.
Sue, a resident of Palmerston North, saw it flash across the sky.
“It kind of looked like a big shooting star, it had a blue tail and it looked like it was about a meter long,” she said.
The images show how the large bright ball of light briefly shoots through the air at high speed.
What looked like a smoke tail was actually “dust” from the meteor that had evaporated and could be seen in the sky for a while afterwards.
Big bangs, loud or faint rumbles were heard between Masterton and Wellington, but not everyone heard a sound.
Police received a number of calls about the meteor, but none reported damage or that it had landed.
Curiously, the country’s last significant meteor was sighted on July 7, 1999.
On this day, 23 years ago, a fireball crossed Taranaki, but was seen and heard as far south as Timaru and as far north as Ninety Mile Beach.
Today’s meteor appeared to be slightly smaller, but remarkable nonetheless.
The director of the Otago Museum, Ian Griffin, said seeing a meteor was a fairly rare event, but today it came at a time of one valuable resource: technology.
“What’s really exciting about this is that we live in an age where people have it recorded on dashcams or security cameras at home,” Griffin said.
“If we get those images, we may be able to determine the object’s path through the sky and possibly, if it survived its fall, to figure out where it landed.”
He said those who did not catch the event on camera can still assist with the investigation.
“If you saw it and heard a bang, that’s also very interesting. Knowing the time between when you saw the flash of light and heard the bang gives us a sense of distance.”
Space specialist Duncan Steel had seen only one meteor during the day.
†[Meteors] are due to macrometeoroids in the atmosphere entering very quickly, usually 30 km per second. To be seen during the day, it has to be quite large, something the size of a rugby ball or larger — that’s what makes them rare,” Steel said.
He said it would be “very unusual” for the meteor to have had an impact on Earth’s surface — instead, he believed it was very similar to the evaporation of the space rock.
But the meteor dust would still technically fall to the ground — Steel said meteor dust was everywhere.
“All you need to do is swipe your fingers over the mantel, because typically one in 1,000 dust particles in a house are micrometeorites.”