At the George Observatory (about 50 miles SouthWest of Houston, Texas) last Saturday night, at 01:21 April 25 UTC, we saw an extremely bright object about 15 degrees high in the East, slowly moving down towards the horizon. It had a distinct orange color and fragmented into at least 8 pieces which at first appeared to separate, but then as the object continued lower and lower, they appeared to re-converge. I'm pretty sure that was a large re-entering object in an approximately West-to-East orbit re-entering somewhere East of us. Any idea what that was? I've seen no news reports... I would have expected somewhere East of Houston it must have been utterly spectacular. And further East it would have been against a darker sky; in Houston it was still twilight, but that was no problem as this object was a significant fraction of the brightness of the full moon that was also present in the sky. The alternative was that it was some sort of local firework.... but by the way the fragments appeared to converge towards a vanishing point, I think it must have been very far away and traveling away from us. And we heard no bang etc. Someone who was quick with her smart phone got a photo and a short movie, but I'm not sure that would add much to my description. People at the George all saw it because we all started yelling "look East, look East!". We were setting up for a public observing night (with socially distanced observing protocols in place). _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Thu Apr 29 2021 - 00:22:08 UTC
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