A bright green fireball lit up the night sky across the North Island last night.
Video of the meteor was captured and shared online by the Tauranga Astronomical Society just before 7.45pm.
"We captured this on one of our meteor cameras at the observatory (Fergusson Park, Matua, Tauranga) and TAS member David Greig captured it on one of his home meteor cameras," it said online.
The Society said the fireball was travelling from west to east over the upper North Island and would have ended up in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of New Zealand.
Watch: Mystery green fireball flashes across skies over New Zealand - Watch on TVNZ+
Tauranga Astronomical Society president and Fireballs Aotearoa member David Greig told 1News this meteor originated from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and was a remnant from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
Regarding the vivid green colour of the meteor, he said "the colour of a meteor comes down to the composition of the meteor, the metals in it.
"Green tends to be magnesium," he explained.
Green meteors (often called fireballs) were caused by the vaporisation of specific elements — primarily magnesium, nickel, or iron — as a space rock superheats upon entering Earth's atmosphere at high speeds.
"When a meteoroid high in magnesium burns up, it emits a bright teal or cyan-green light," Greig said.
The intense glow happens because extreme air compression in front of the fast-moving rock (often traveling up to 60km/s) heats the outer layers to extreme temperatures, forcing the vaporised atoms to emit light at specific wavelengths.
Fireballs Aotearoa director Steve Wyn-Harris said the fireball was seen by many people "because it was early in the evening, and it lasted a long time, 10 seconds".
"It finished up over the ocean north of Tauranga and south east of Whitianga," he said.
"[It] probably didn't drop any meteorites into the ocean as burnt up about 30km up. They need to get below 25km to drop rocks," Wyn-Harris explained.
He said when the fireball entered our atmosphere 90km up, it was travelling about 17km/s and 10 seconds later when it burnt up it was travelling at 5 to 6 km/s. They need to be down to 2-3km/s to stop ablating to drop meteorites.
Some residents also reported seeing the fireball across Waikato and the Bay of Plenty, and shared their accounts on Facebook.
One person wrote: "Was sitting in the spa pool relaxing and it went straight over me, was stunning! Wish I had caught it on camera."
Another person who reported seeing it from their home in Tauranga said it "looked bright green with a white tail. I thought it was a firework at first."
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