I wish it was as exciting as a portal into another dimension, or something similar, however ...
The sight was most prominent in the South Island around 7.30pm.
While there were plenty of theories about what caused the sight, the New Plymouth Astronomical Society offered a likely explanation.
"The 'spiral' that was seen in the sky tonight around 7:30pm was most likely a fuel dump from a SpaceX rocket launch," it wrote on Facebook.
"Similar effects have been seen before, and SpaceX's Globalstar 2 FM15 was likely to have passed New Zealand around that time. It is shown in the video below passing South of NZ just over an hour into its flight which would have been around 5:30, and would probably have passed again around 90-120 minutes later which would then have been around 7:30."
