A very bright green fireball crossed the upper North Island just before 7.44pm on Sunday night, and the volunteer network that tracks these things says the rock almost certainly finished its journey in the sea.
Fireballs Aotearoa, a citizen science group run under the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand, posted about the sighting within minutes. “Heads up!” the group wrote on social media. “A very bright green fireball was seen passing west to east over the upper North Island tonight just before 7.44pm.”
Reports came in from across Waikato and the Bay of Plenty and reached as far south as Waikanae on the Kāpiti Coast. Social media users described seeing it from Rotorua, Morrinsville, Hamilton, Kawerau, Ōhope and Papamoa East, according to the New Zealand Herald, which gathered the first accounts on Sunday evening.
The Tauranga Astronomical Society captured video showing the fireball streaking over a sports field and growing brighter and greener as it crossed the sky. A second clip, submitted to Fireballs Aotearoa by Ōtūmoetai resident David Greig, showed a long white trail before the object vanished behind cloud.
One person in Rotorua said they saw a “big white light” that broke into about three sections before fading. A witness at Upper Oropi described it as “bright green with white tail”. A Papamoa East resident said it was “so long and bright”. A Hamilton witness said they saw it “clear as day”, and another person near Rotorua said they watched it for about 15 seconds.
That last detail is the interesting one. Most shooting stars are gone in a blink. The fireball that dropped New Zealand’s newest meteorite in the Wairarapa in late July lasted about seven seconds from the moment it became visible to the point where it had slowed too much to keep burning. A sighting lasting anything like 15 seconds suggests either a shallow entry angle or a witness generously rounding up, which is exactly why the group asks for camera footage rather than relying on memory.
Fireballs Aotearoa said the mass appeared to have ended up over the ocean, and urged people to check their security cameras for footage. That request is not an afterthought. The group runs a network of low cost meteor cameras spread across the country, many of them installed at schools and operated by astronomical societies and individual volunteers. The Royal Astronomical Society describes it as one of the densest such networks in the Southern Hemisphere. The cameras upload their observations to the Global Meteor Network every day, and when a fireball appears on several of them at once, analysts can triangulate the path, work out how fast the object was travelling, estimate how much of it survived and calculate where any surviving pieces would have landed. A doorbell camera or a farm security camera with a known fixed position is worth a great deal in that calculation. A phone video shot from a moving car is worth much less.
If the trajectory does put the remains offshore, there will be no search. That is the ordinary outcome. Most of what falls on this planet lands in water, and even over land the odds are poor.
New Zealand has done a great deal better than usual in the past couple of years. In late July a fireball crossed the lower North Island at 10.26pm and was seen from Kāpiti to Masterton, followed by a sonic boom heard on the Kāpiti Coast and around western Wairarapa. Fireballs Aotearoa worked out the likely strewn field, organised a search, and after several days volunteers found four small fragments weighing 8, 9, 12 and 40 grams. It is New Zealand’s 11th confirmed meteorite and only the third seen to fall.
In the group’s statement on that recovery, released on 7 August, director Steve Wyn-Harris explained what the cameras had shown. “The camera data showed to us that the meteor was first visible in Earth’s atmosphere at 90 km, where it was travelling at a rapid 14 km/s,” he said. By the time it dropped to 18 kilometres above the ground it had slowed to about 2 kilometres a second, and the compressed air in front of it had melted the rock’s outer surface. That melting is the fireball.
Very little survives that process. “During the fireball stage, small meteors generally lose between 90 and 100% of their mass,” Dr Marshall Palmer of Fireballs Aotearoa said in the same statement. He noted that the 813 gram Takapō meteorite the group found in Canterbury in March 2024 had entered the atmosphere weighing roughly 14 kilograms.
Anything that does reach the ground carries a signature. “Meteorite fragments that land usually have black crust, which is known as a fusion crust,” Professor James Scott of Fireballs Aotearoa said. The crust is a thin skin of glass, formed when the outside of the rock was briefly molten.
The colour people keep describing has a straightforward explanation too. Te Whatu Stardome astronomer Josh Aoraki, speaking to RNZ in February after a separate sighting, said a fireball “usually moves a bit slower and is a lot brighter” than a normal shooting star. “Often you can see an object breaking up and flashing with light, and they have a distinct green hue, very different from a satellite or a comet,” he said.
Aoraki also put the rarity in proportion. “Meteors themselves are not rare. Astronomers estimate that about 100 tonnes of debris, which is essentially stuff from space, falls to Earth every day,” he said. “The rarity is actually seeing them because we don’t usually get very bright ones. Most happen over the ocean, so to see it over a populated area is very rare.”
Sunday night’s fireball is at least the third widely reported over the North Island in about five weeks, after the Wairarapa fall on 28 July and another sighting two nights later. That is not evidence that more rock is arriving. It is mostly a sign that there are now more cameras pointed at the sky, and more people who know where to send the footage.
Anyone who saw the fireball, or has camera footage of it, can file a report through the Fireballs Aotearoa website. Anyone who thinks they have found an unusual rock is asked to email meteorites@rasnz.org.nz with photographs, including one of a broken surface showing the interior, and a description of where it was found.
If you want to know when the sky above your own town is likely to be clear enough for this sort of thing, our New Zealand stargazing forecast gives cloud, moon and darkness conditions for the nights ahead.
Did you see the fireball on Sunday night, or catch it on a camera? Tell us where you were and what you saw in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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