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A bright burning ball of flame stunned residents of Warkworth at 9.22pm on December 9 when it briefly tore across the night sky.
Gretchen Thomason witnessed it and described it as being like a giant sparkler.
“I thought it was a firework, but I thought I must have been seeing things because there was no sound,” she said.
Warkworth’s Bill Boyce got a shock when his son ran out of his bedroom shouting about seeing the sky light up outside his window.
Bill checked his security camera and found that it had been facing the right direction to capture footage of the phenomenon.
Auckland Stardome Observatory astronomer Josh Kirkley says it appears to be what is colloquially known as a fireball.
“From my analysis, it certainly does appear to be a meteor due to the speed,” Josh says. “It is moving much faster than it would if it were space debris.”
He says a fireball is simply a meteor that burns particularly brightly in the sky instead of appearing as a shooting star.
He says about half a million fireball meteors hit the Earth each year, but very few are ever captured on film.
“Most won’t be seen at all because they might occur during the day or over the ocean, and very few are ever filmed because they are gone before you can get the camera out.”
Each year, the Geminid meteor shower occurs in mid-December, but Josh says the fireball over Warkworth was likely just a random occurrence.
