The 10th meteorite ever to be found in New Zealand's history was discovered on Thursday in the Mackenzie Country by a volunteer search team.
But the story behind it is just as epic as the discovery - it all started with a couple sitting in a spa pool.
Rewind a few days earlier and that same meteorite tore through the sky at more than 50km/s.
At this exact time, Dennis Behan and his wife were sitting in their Queenstown spa.
"We saw a fireball streak across the sky and it was really exciting... I've never seen one before," Behan said. "We were just speechless."
Incredibly, Behan happens to be a meteorite enthusiast - in fact, he has a specialist meteorite camera mounted near his spa.
"[It] points in the same direction that would have captured footage of it," he said.
And it did. He raced inside because, thankfully, he knew who to report the sighting to.
"It honestly looked like it landed just over the hill from where we live... but turns out it landed 170km away," Behan said. "They were able to use the data my camera collected to start the search."
Experts narrowed the search down to a small section of the Mackenzie Country, where they rallied a group of volunteers - citizen scientists - from Fireballs Aotearoa.
"It is primo ground to go searching for a meteorite, so we started organising the search straight away," citizen scientist Marshall Palmer said.
Then, 20 minutes later, Jack from Wellington found it.
It was a crazy and very rare find. Meteorites are elusive - the last one they searched for had hundreds of people on the ground near Mosgiel for days but it was never found.
Behan said the find was like a fairytale.
"It fell out of the sky, I got to witness that... my camera captured it," he said. "I got to be part of the search and hold it in my hand."
The 800g blast from the past could now help reveal the beginnings of time. It's a moment in history and a moment to remember.
