Hi all! I only remembered this when reading through some previous newsletters of my astronomy club. It's an article posted by our Director of Observing. Maybe one of you experts can help us! ================== >On the evening of March 31 at 20h44 local time (18h44 UT), I settled down in my sleeping bag for another >watch on the Virginid Meteor stream, which I had been watching for the past couple of weeks. Little did I >expect the strange events that would unfold. I've spent thousands of hours observing over the years, but >never experienced something that I literally could not explain. >At 21h31 (19h31 UT) I was startled by a star that suddenly appeared in Virgo, near the centre of my view. >The star quickly brightened to magnitude 2, then faded away between magnitude 3 and 4, where it stayed >for 5 minutes, before suddenly fading to invisibility. It seemed to remain motionless for the entire 5 minutes. >Puzzled, I went back to meteor observing, but could not put the thing totally out of my mind. >Then suddenly at 22h34 (20h34 UT), my eye was caught by a flashing object in Virgo. At first I thought it >was a short meteor, but 20 seconds later another flash, then another, and so it went on flashing every 20 >seconds. By now I thought that someone in the Pretoria Centre was playing an early, elaborate April Fool's >joke on me, so I phoned Louis Barendse. Within 10 minutes Louis phoned and confirmed that I had not gone >completely mad, since he too witnessed the mad flasher. I continued to plot the object's slow path across the >sky until nearly 1 am (23h00 UT, March 31) on April 1. Lo and behold its path could be tracked back to the >starlike object I witnessed earlier in the evening. To add to the intrigue, the flashed was visible two nights >later, following an almost identical path. >So far, no-one seems to have a plausible explanation for what Louis and I saw. We think it might have been >a satellite launch, but need confirmation. A meteor colleague of mine in the USA suspects it was a discarded >second stage booster rocket. Whatever it was if anyone out there can help, Louis and Tim would be glad to >hear from you, and solve the mystery of the Virgo flasher once and for all. The writer of the article is at 28018'58.0"E + 26005'24.7"S = 28,316 degrees East and 26,09 degrees South. Koos van Zyl