fireball light
Spectacular footage has emerged of a meteor soaring over south-eastern Australia overnight, engulfing the night sky in a brilliant explosion of light.

Dashcam and CCTV vision show a ball of light racing through the sky before exploding just before midnight, triggering reports from Adelaide to the Gippsland coast in Victoria's east.

Vice President of the Astronomical Society Perry Vlahos told 9News that it's relatively rare to see a "piece of space dust" that "bright in the sky."


"There was a piece of space dust, not much larger than a marble,' he said

"(It was) swept up by earth, entered the atmosphere and burned up brightly about 90kms above our heads."

Mr Perry said although the meteor was small, it released a lot of energy in a very short period of time causing witnesses to see its greenish hue, before it finished with a dome of orange.

Tons of space material enters the earth's atmosphere every day, much of it during daylight hours, meaning it's not visible to the naked eye. And when it does happen at night, there needs to be someone looking up at the right time.

"Often these things occur and no-one is looking so It was terrific to have all this people see it," Mr Perry said.

The event which was caught by the 9News skycam in Adelaide, resulted in a number of calls to emergency services.

Witnesses across Adelaide and other parts of the state have described seeing the "huge fireball" crashing towards earth, with many taking to social media to report the event.

"It lit up the whole sky" said one woman, with another commenting that "it looked like daylight".

The event is the latest in a series of meteor showers, spotted across the country in the past few days.