A flaming meteor has been filmed exploding in the sky by a South Australian driver's dash cam.
Neal Hopgood was travelling along the Riddoch Highway between Allendale and Port MacDonnell on Saturday when a bright, blue-white light appeared in the distance for a matter of seconds.
"I had my son and his friend in the back … we just caught the last bit of it exploding," he said.
"To be honest I just thought it was a plane because the smoke trail behind it was a bit wonky."
It was his son's friend Liam, 6, whose voice can be heard in the footage as he noticed the light.
"What's that?" Liam said.
"It's gone down the sky then exploded, that light."
Mr Hopgood said he was surprised to catch such an event on camera.
"It was just absolute luck … I was very surprised by how clear it was on the dash cam," he said.
"That was pretty extraordinary to see it and in the daylight made it even more rare."
'Even rarer to see'
Eleanor Sansom from the Space and Technology Centre at Curtin University and the Desert Fireball Network said the cameras that monitored outback space activity missed the meteor by five minutes.
"It's actually quite hard to tell where it's coming from, just from what we saw, but the fact that it was that bright is definitely what we call a fireball … a meteor is just the technical word for a shooting star," she said.
Dr Sansom said a shooting star was usually made up of small particles that exploded into a fireball such as the one filmed by Mr Hopgood.
"Those are much rarer, especially when … there's still some sort of sunlight — it's even rarer to see," she said.
"It is quite hard to tell, but the ones that come in that are bright like that could be anywhere from the size of a football to the size of a car."
'Meteor storm' forecast
Dr Sansom said the meteor's fiery demise could signal the start of a "storm" to come.
The Southern Taurid meteor shower is likely to be seen from November 4-9.
"There's predicted to be a meteor storm this year so maybe over the next few nights we're going to get a lot of them," Dr Sansom said.
"The last time it had a bit of an outburst through the atmosphere was in 2015 — so its been a while since we've had a lot of meteors from that stream and it's predicted to be happening again this year.
"They're much easier to see when it's dark.
"This one, probably if you're looking around the north-east anytime around 9:15pm, you should start seeing some around.
"There's usually just six to 10 an hour — but you might get lucky."
