It was the meteor that wasn’t.

Just like Perth’s sky, social media lit up on Tuesday night after some keen-eyed observers noticed what looked like a ball of fire falling through the sky.

Disappointingly, though, it’s cause was less extra terrestrial and more mundane.

It was a condensation trail from “habitual offender” Qatar airways, according to Perth Observatory’s Matt Woods.

“It just happens to be the flight plan that they fly over Perth, it is not that they are in the wrong or anything like that,” he said.

Camera Icon Perth Observatory field multiple calls a month about contrails. Credit: Hani Gaby

“The conditions are just perfect for contrails, so considering how cold it has been down here it is a lot colder up there so when the jet exhaust hits the water vapour in the atmosphere it heats that water vapour and turns it into cloud.

“The reason it looked orange was due to where the sun was setting.”

Mr Woods said the observatory fielded multiple calls a month from people thinking they had spotted meteors that were actually just contrails.

He said people could check for themselves on heavens-above.com or flightradar24.com to rule out the international space station or plane flights as the cause of anything out of the ordinary they see in the sky.

“If it is something that lasts a couple of seconds then that’s definitely a bit of space junk or a meteor. If it is lasting minutes it’s terrestrial,” he said.

“Just like (when a meteor hit) back in August it will usually be green, it will start off as a streak and if it’s a fireball it will brighten quite a lot and then it fade back down as it burns up in the atmosphere.”

The August meteor lit up the sky from Mindarie to Meckering and was accompanied by a large bang and a bright flash of light.

The space rock was thought to have fallen somewhere between Northam and York but is yet to be found.

Mr Woods said it was not unusual for space junk to come hurtling through the atmosphere with hundreds of tonnes hitting earth every year.