CCTV footage has captured the moment a shooting star flew across the night sky over Hapton.
The star was spotted on Tuesday night, March 18, by Jordan Burnie, which was out of the ordinary as there were no meteor showers meant to be occurring at that time.
There has already been one meteor shower this year, with stargazers witnessing 50 shooting stars an hour, during the Quadrantid meteor shower.
However, the next one is not predicted until early April, making this incident a one-off.
Shooting stars are not enormous centres of gas like the sun but instead small solid objects that are typically less than 100km above the surface of Earth.
They occur when a small fragment of rock or dust enters the Earth’s atmosphere.
Unlike many astronomical events, meteor showers are easy to watch and do not require any special equipment to be enjoyed.
However, Dr Massey, deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society warns that those hoping to get a perfect night shot may need to invest in a more sophisticated camera, than just a smartphone.
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He said: “You’re unlikely to catch anything [with a phone] because they’re so fleeting – they only last perhaps a fraction of a second – so your reactions are not going to be good enough to photograph it.
“So what people tend to do is what are called long exposures.
“They open up the lens or the shutter and leave it running for several minutes, or anything up to half an hour.
“In some cases, people have sky cameras which run all night.
“You have to do that because you never know exactly when a meteor is coming.
“Photographing meteor showers requires patience!”
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