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Fireballs Aotearoa wants you to go and catch a falling star.
Or at least capture one on a camera.
Fireballs Aotearoa is a collaborative effort of amateur skywatchers and astronomers and geologists at the University of Canterbury and the University of Otago. Their aim is to create a camera network to photograph meteors as they burn across the sky.
Multiple camera recordings allow a meteor’s path to be tracked. From this, the probable landing site of meteorites, those bits of meteor that land on the ground, can be calculated.
Associate Prof James Scott, of the Otago geology department, founded Fireballs Aotearoa last month.
He said about 70,000 meteorites had been collected worldwide, but only 40 had been photographed as they streaked through the atmosphere.
A mere 10 meteorites had been found in New Zealand.
"There must be more.
"Until now, we haven’t had the luck or the cameras to find them," Prof Scott said.
So far, Fireballs Aotearoa has four cameras: two in Nelson and one each in Wellington and Invercargill.
That is too bad for Dunedin — on Tuesday, about 4.30pm, University of Otago electron beam data technician Dr Marianne Negrini saw "some kind of big object explode in the sky".
It was off the coast of Dunedin and silently broke into two or three pieces, she said.
"You need very good timing to catch these," Dr Negrini said.
Had a camera been trained over the ocean, it might have caught the fireball as it blazed.
Meteor camera networks exist elsewhere around the globe.
The United Kingdom Meteor Observation Network, part of the larger UK Fireball Alliance, helped recover chunks of the Winchcombe meteorite in south-central England last year.
They were 4.6billion years old and originated in the asteroid belt.
Prof Scott said that if a meteorite was found quickly it would not degrade, and more information could be derived from it.
We could learn where it came from and what its orbit was.
He said meteorites were important because they were spyglasses into the past and helped us understand how planets formed.
"They are the fossils of our solar system," he said.
Some meteorites hailed from Mars and could tell us more about that planet’s history, he said.
The Winchcombe meteorite was the same material as the sun’s core, Prof Scott said.
Now, we can all help to find these grace notes from the music of the spheres. Cameras are available at Fireballs Aotearoa’s website, fireballs.nz, for $350. Once installed and connected to your home Wi-Fi network, they look up and record.