Expert: Philip Stahl - 1/14/2008

Question
Hi. Tonight me and two of my friends were stargazing and saw about 5 shooting stars scattered across the sky about 3 minutes apart. Suddenly the ENTIRE sky, I'm talking from as far as we could see in every direction and above us, flashed a greeny blue colour for about half a second. We could not see any stars or clouds or ANYTHING but the bright greeny blue flash in the sky, which seemed as if the sky itself were glowing. It was almost like lightning but DEFINETLY not and a complete different colour. The sky was perfectly clear and we could see every star before and after the flash. I then turned around to where i thought the bluey green hue was fading towards (at an very fast rate, like a second) and saw what looked exactly like a comet moving at a fair speed, but the comet faded quickly (about 7 seconds till we couldn't even see the trail) and it seemed as if the greeny blue light in the sky was receding towards it, like the light came out of it and retreated back in. as ridiculous as this may sound. We were not on any drugs or under the influence of alcohol. It was at exactly the minute of 12:45am and we live in the north island of New Zealand. We searched the internet and the only results we found are a green flash that can occur above the sun at sunset or sunrise and it was definetly nowhere near either and looked nothing like the pictures as it covered the whole sky. We are completely stunned and were left a little unnerved by this phenomenon. Can you shine any light on this occurance? Thanks alot. Please explain this! :)

Answer
Hello,

All I can do here is recount a similar experience my wife and I had in Barbados - while observing objects in its eastern sky - some thirty years ago.

Just as you described there were bright greenish-blue flashes that lasted about a half second each, and occurred over a duration of about 3-4 mins.

As it turned out, from what we later uncovered, a stream of bolides (very large meteoroids) had entered the Earth's atmosphere and broken apart. What we had observed were assorted fragments vaporizing and the bright flashes were gaseous envelopes.

This is the best I can do - based on my past experience - and bear in mind it is not definitive, only a guess as to what you observed!