Experts have described the meteor that lit up the sky across New Zealand's North Island last night as 'quite large”.

Tauranga Astronomical Society president Stuart Murray says the meteor – almost certainly a piece of rock – was in fact three separate pieces around three-to-five metres in diameter.

Last night's meteor caught on the dash cam of Tauranga man Josh Sherborne. Watch the video here.

'It was quite large as meteors or shooting stars go, and it was travelling at about 20 kilometres per second,” says Stuart.

'I unfortunately didn't see the meteor, but I did hear the sonic boom just after 10pm not thinking it was from a passing meteor.”

Stuart says there is rarely any indication or warning of the approach of a meteor of this size.

'Meteors of various sizes are constantly hitting the earth and at night we just see them as shooting stars,” he adds.

'These can be anything from the size of a grain of sand upwards. They are pieces of space ‘junk'.

'Annually, they add up to a minute increase of weight on the earth.”

Generally, meteors of this size burn up in the upper atmosphere, with nothing more than very small particles reaching the earth's surface.

And Stuart says even last night's event could well have been way up in the upper atmosphere.

'Because it was travelling well beyond the speed of sound, people heard the sonic boom up minutes after it had passed over. Sound travels a bit less than one kilometre every second, hence the delay.

'It's when they increase in size, as happened in Russia in 2013 and also in 1908, that they have the potential for disastrous results.”

Stuart says the sonic boom from the 2013 meteor, that could also have been a small asteroid, caused a lot of physical damage to glass and windows etc.

'And this was not too much larger than last night's,” he adds. 'From memory it was about 20 metres in diameter.

'The 1908 Tunguska event was much larger again and this fortunately exploded over the Siberian wilderness causing a huge amount of destruction.”

Had it arrived a few hours later, Stuart says Russian cities further west could have been devastated.

'So you can see it is similar to earthquakes,” he says. 'You never know when they are going to occur or whereabouts.”