Greg Price set up his camera in the hope that he would capture an aurora from his home in Richmond, Nelson, on New Zealand's South Island, when he "got lucky" and captured a meteor instead.
Taken using time-lapse, a bright green streak could be seen lighting up the clear night sky at 8.06pm local time on Thursday.
Price said he didn't manage to capture the aurora, but the meteor was "a pretty good one".
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"It is really impressive how it lit up the sky bright green for five to 10 seconds."
Comments on social media from Canterbury residents from Halswell to Oxford said they heard a bang and felt their homes shake.
In order for a meteor to be heard, it would need to reach below 60km above ground level, astronomer and retired superintendent at Mt John Observatory Alan Gilmore said.
Based in Lake Takapō village, Gilmore said he didn't see or hear the meteor. They were "very common" but reports of hearing a boom implied it was "quite big", he said.
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Superintendent at Mt John Observatory Nigel Frost said no-one at the observatory saw the meteor.
"It's such a split second thing, so you need to be in the right place at the right time."
Dr Duncan Steel of Xerra Earth Observation Institute guessed the meteor would have been about the size of a football, weighing about 10kg to 20kg.
He said a meteor reaching the ground, producing a meteorite, was very unusual and he did not expect the meteor observed on Thursday to have reached the ground.
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"What you are seeing is the object vaporising at an altitude of 50km down to 30km," he said, which was far higher than a jetliner, which reaches a height of about 10km above ground.
Steel said the Earth was hit by about 100 tonnes of meteoroids per day, but the majority were small (below a millimetre in diameter) which 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 said.
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, previously caught a meteor that streaked across the night sky above Nelson and left a lingering smoke trail.
He captured the meteor on Thursday using his Nikon Z7 camera, with a Samyang XP 14mm F2.4 lens, using a 10-second exposure time and an auto-ISO of 2800.
He reported it to Fireballs Aotearoa, an organisation aiming to recover freshly-fallen meteorites in New Zealand.
This story originally appeared on Stuff and is republished here with permission.
