All fired up after snapping a meteor
Greg Price set up his camera in the hope he would snap an aurora from his home in Richmond, Nelson but he ‘‘got lucky’’ and captured a meteor instead.
In his time-lapse image, a bright green streak can be seen lighting up the clear night sky at 8.06pm on Thursday.
Price said he didn’t manage to capture the aurora, but the meteor was ‘‘a pretty good one’’.
‘‘It is really impressive how it lit up the sky bright green for five to 10 seconds.’’
This was New Zealand’s second notable fireball this month.
On July 7, a meteor exploded in daylight near Wellington with a force equivalent to 1800 tonnes of TNT, creating a sonic boom heard across New Zealand, the University of Canterbury said.
Dr Michele Bannister said anyone finding a potential meteorite should check for a distinctive black surface from the meteor melting as it passed through the atmosphere.
Bannister asked if anyone saw one to take a photograph of it in place, and note the location using GPS on a phone. ‘‘Avoid touching it with your bare hands (the less contamination the better). Pick it up in fresh aluminium foil if possible.’’
Fireballs Aotearoa meteorite analysis lead scientist Dr James Scott of Otago University said Thursday night’s meteor fragmented towards the end of its flight.
‘‘Most of the meteoroid vaporised during the six or so seconds of visible flight. However, with this one, it’s possible fragments may have reached ground level somewhere in the central South Island.’’
If any meteorite is found from the July 21 fireball, it would be Canterbury’s first meteorite recovered in over 50 years.
Comments on social media by Canterbury residents located from Halswell to Oxford said they heard a bang and felt their homes shake.
Dr Duncan Steel, of Xerra Earth Observation Institute, guessed the meteor would have been about the size of a football, weighing 10to 20 kilograms.
Steel said the Earth was hit by about 100 tonnes of meteoroids per day, but the majority were small (below a millimetre in diameter). They usually ablated high in the atmosphere, above 80km, and were too faint to be seen.
To see one with the human eye, meteoroids needed to be at least about a pea or marble size, he added.
Meteoroids are chunks of asteroidal matter still in space before it hits the atmosphere. Meteors are the streak of light emitted when the item enters the atmosphere, and anything that makes it to the Earth’s surface is called a meteorite.
Price, who is an amateur photographer, captured Thursday’s meteor with a Samyang XP 14mm F2.4 lens on his Nikon Z7 camera. He used a 10-second exposure time and an auto-ISO of 2800.