Virgo Flasher

Koos van Zyl (koos@writeme.com)
Tue, 09 Jun 1998 00:07:52 +0200

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