A large fireball lit up the sky over Taranaki just before 11pm on Wednesday, and the volunteer network that tracks these events says the rock probably came down in the sea off the Waikato coast, somewhere west of the small settlement of Marakopa.
Kaponga resident Andy Banks had no idea he had filmed it until Thursday morning. He heard about the fireball, checked his security cameras and found that one of them had caught the whole thing, with Mount Taranaki standing in the foreground as the flash crossed the sky. “Turns out the roof camera had the best view, and what a view,” he told RNZ in an email. “Having the mountain as a backdrop just added to the phenomenon.”
Steve Wyn-Harris of Fireballs Aotearoa, the citizen science camera network that watches New Zealand’s night sky, described it to 1News as a “major fireball” seen by “many” people across the North Island and the top of the South Island. “Our camera network has many of our cameras capturing the event, and the flash far outshone the nearly full moon that was in the sky at the same time out in the West,” he said.
Wyn-Harris said the object most likely entered the atmosphere over the sea off the Taranaki coast and “likely dropped meteorites”, but the group was not planning a search. Fireballs Aotearoa said separately that it “fell over the ocean west of Marakopa”. That puts the end of its flight well north of where most people watching from Taranaki would have guessed. A bright fireball seen low on the horizon almost always looks closer than it is, which is why a meteor burning out a hundred kilometres away can appear to drop just past the next ridge.
How big was it? Less than the footage might suggest. Dr Kaitlyn Martin, education lead at Auckland’s Te Whatu Stardome Observatory and Planetarium, told RNZ it was hard to judge the size from video, but the rock “would have been considerably larger before entering the atmosphere than any fragment surviving near the end”.
“Something between a softball and a rugby ball would be a reasonable rough illustration – certainly we’re not talking about a car-sized asteroid,” she said. “The glowing that we’re seeing in the videos isn’t the size of the rock itself, but the light produced as it travels through and interacts with the atmosphere.”
That is the part people most often get wrong. A meteor arrives at tens of kilometres a second, and the air in front of it is compressed and heated so violently that it glows. The streak of light is that superheated air and vaporised rock, stretched out over many kilometres, not the stone itself. Most of the rock is burned or blasted away high in the atmosphere. What survives, if anything does, is usually a handful of small pieces.
Martin said the end of the visible fireball did not mean the end of the rock. “When the fireball ‘goes out’, that doesn’t necessarily mean the rock has disappeared,” she said. Any surviving fragments slow down sharply and enter what scientists call dark flight, when they are no longer moving fast enough to glow but are still falling to the ground.
“Where they eventually land is harder to predict because of factors like wind and size/shape of the remaining fragment impacting the trajectory,” she said. “But that kind of modelling can be done – Fireballs Aotearoa have successfully used it to recover meteorites or fragments from events like Takapō in 2024 and the Ruamāhanga fireball in July this year.”
The July recovery is the one that showed what the camera network can do. A fireball crossed the lower North Island at 10.26pm on 28 July and, after several days walking paddocks north of Masterton, searchers picked up four small stones that were confirmed as New Zealand’s 11th meteorite. The search was possible because several cameras had recorded the fireball from different angles, which allowed its path to be worked out and projected to the ground.
It has been a busy few months overhead. Just days before the Wairarapa fall, a fireball off the North Otago coast was reported to police as a plane going down near Oamaru, and on 30 August a bright green fireball crossed the upper North Island and also appears to have finished over the ocean. Wednesday’s is at least the fourth widely seen fireball over New Zealand since late July.
Martin said it was not yet clear whether this rock belonged to a known meteor shower or was a lone “sporadic meteoroid”. Answering that depends on exactly the kind of footage Andy Banks captured on his roof.
“The increasing availability of footage from security cameras and citizen science projects like Fireballs Aotearoa [and] their network of cameras is so useful – the data from multiple observations of the same fireball is really what makes us able to do any type of analysis on path, orbit, size, and speed beyond, ‘Wow! Bright flash!’” she said.
Security and doorbell cameras are especially valuable because they sit in a fixed, known position, so the angle of the fireball across the frame can be measured precisely. Anyone who saw Wednesday night’s fireball or has it on camera can log the sighting through the Fireballs Aotearoa reporting page, which asks for the time, place and direction of what was seen.
There is a small chance some fragments reached land along the Waikato or Taranaki coast. Martin’s advice to anyone who stumbles on an unusual dark stone is to leave it where it lies, because handling it “could contaminate or damage a scientifically valuable sample”.
“The best thing you can do is take photos of the meteorite and its landing site, mark exactly where and when you found it, don’t disturb, and send that information to Fireballs Aotearoa and the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand,” she said.
Fresh meteorites are among the rarest objects a New Zealander is ever likely to find. According to RNZ, only 11 have been found in this country in total, and two of those have come this decade. Most rocks that reach Earth from space land in water, and the rest mostly fall in bush, mountains or farmland where nobody is looking. Wednesday night’s rock probably joined the majority at the bottom of the Tasman Sea, but plenty of people across the North Island got to see it on its way down.
The moon is full this weekend, which will wash out fainter meteors for the next few nights, although a fireball as bright as this one cuts through moonlight easily. Our stargazing forecast shows where the skies will be clearest around the country each night.
Did you see the fireball on Wednesday night, or catch it on a security camera? Tell us where you were and what it looked like 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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