THE sky came alive on Sunday evening, 1 June, with Port Macquarie locals stopped in their tracks by colourful lights, flashes, and luminous glowing.
Leaving a trail of bright blue, white and green – and veils of flickering reds – the stellar phenomena was observed by those who were impressed, and those wondering what on earth they had just witnessed.
Campbell Barron was finishing up a support shift on Fernhill Road when the whole sky lit up.
He managed to grab a very impressive video of the exact moment a light trailed overhead.
“It was observable for approximately 15 seconds and it took me a few seconds of being stunned to grab the phone to try and get some footage of it’, he told News Of The Area.
“It travelled from my left to right at quite a low angle to the ground, at incredible speeds.
“It was changing colours from red and purple to blue to green as it was throwing off different materials… due to the heat of the entry into the atmosphere.”
Campbell noted that there wasn’t a sound in the sky as the spectacle was in flight, but “the majority of the material appeared to break-up just above land with a loud sonic “crack”.
Shelley Parker was sitting at home in the Westport area when her computer work was interrupted by something she saw out of the corner of her.
“My room is facing south. I saw it [fly] from one side of the window to the other. It was huge”, she said.
“I thought it was a shooting star then realised it was way too big.
“No sound, just light. A big ball of white and blue surrounding it with a long blue-ish green tail.”
Making his way home from work on his motorbike, David Norris noted that it was exactly 5.57pm when he spotted the fire in the sky.
“I was just past the old Koala Hospital on Lord Street, and noticed it streak across the sky in my upper vision – left to right,” he said.
“It had a really long green tail and sparkly gold coming off the front of it.
“I thought it had to be a meteorite as it was so high and going across the sky sideways. No way was it a firework.”
Port Macquarie Observatory member Steve Phelps, confirmed that what many observed was one of two spectacular events that occurred on Sunday evening.
“First was the meteorite seen over NSW about 6pm,” he told News Of The Area.
“These often have a green to red or yellow colour when photographed due to metals in the object and the ionisation of gases as the object enters the atmosphere at very high speed.”
Based on eyewitness reports, Steve said the meteor’s “final disintegration was somewhere over the South Coast of NSW.”
The second unrelated and very magical experience was the Aurora Australis, which peaked at approximately 8pm.
“This was predominantly red at our latitude although further to the south other colours such as green were also captured on camera,” Steve said.
Other parts of the state and country also reported seeing the Aurora Australis dancing in the sky on Sunday night, something that the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) communicated on Facebook as being a G4 severe geomagnetic storm.
The storm is ongoing, but the BOM says conditions are now at level G0 meaning that the chances of a similar sky dance this week are unfortunately slim.
By Rikki WALLER
