Source: Radio New Zealand
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A large flash that lit up the night sky over Wellington was captured by a live feed camera and has prompted speculation it could have been a meteor.
The bright light was seen by people facing south at 11.25pm on Friday night, and travelled from east to west on an almost horizontal trajectory.
A PredictWind.com live feed camera (at timestamp 23:25:26) at the Heretaunga Boating Club, facing over Wellington Harbour from Petone, captured the ‘shooting star’.
It showed a circle of light with a long bright tail behind it entering view over the Eastern Hutt Hills from about a 10 o’clock bearing. The ‘head’ of light then flared brightly to a much bigger size – producing a wider and brighter trail behind it and at least two small bursts of light directly below it – then disappeared, leaving the brightest part of the trail to fade slowly.
“I live in Petone and it lit up my room,” one person said on a Lower Hutt Facebook group.
“I saw it in Tītahi Bay,” another person said. “From my point of view it looked like a green line shooting across the sky,” another said.
Supplied/ PredictWind.com
Several social media commenters asked if it could have been a meteor.
“Watched from my window in Ngaio. Most fantastic streak of blue/teal. Would have burnt up in the atmosphere,” a Redditor said.
Supplied/ PredictWind.com
A MetService spokesperson said sometimes their weather monitoring does pick up things like this, but in this case, while forecasters had checked their radars and other monitoring systems on Friday night, nothing had showed up.
The International Meteor Organisation posted online that data from the US Space Force indicated space debris had been observed re-entering the atmosphere 800km south of New Zealand – but later in the night, at 1.39am NZT(12.39pm UTC).
That was from a “massive (11 tons) second stage of a Chinese rocket, launched on December 3, 2025.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
