Photo of "unusual event" (fireball)
Ed Cannon (ecannon@mail.utexas.edu)
Sun, 06 Dec 1998 03:49:04 -0500
I stumbled across a photo of an "unusual event" that was
captured at 04:16:16 on 24 Sept. 1998 by an all-sky camera at
the Univ. of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada; the event was
also witnessed by members of an astronomy class. It was a
bolide or fireball that took 45 seconds to cross the sky!
That seemed like kind of a long time for a natural fireball
(although the 10 Aug 1972 daylight fireball was filmed for 26
seconds and observed by a sensing satellite for 41 seconds --
http://medicine.wustl.edu/~kronkg/1972.html), so I wondered if
it might have been a re-entry. However, it doesn't match any
decay in Alan Pickup's list.
I've learned that its track was NNW to SW, which sounds like,
if it had been a re-entry, it would have been of an object in
a retrograde orbit. Anyway, here's the URL of the page with
the photo and caption:
http://astrowww.phys.uvic.ca/~balam/UV980924.html
Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA