It seems the fuel dump for the Centaur upper stage was seen from Bejing.
Here are some reports by Hang Muen from the Bejing planetarium.
Posted on the Comet-Obs list.
Yiran Wu (39.979deg N, 116.299deg E, northwest suburb of Beijing)
found the object in Aries by naked-eye and immediately reported to me
at 11:21 UT (hereafter). Her estimation of total magnitude is
about -2 ("somewhat bighter than Sirius").
I myself (39.883deg N, 116.617deg E) saw the object with a 12x60
binocular. The object had a typical cometary apperance with a
slightly curved tail towards SE-E, at 11:24. Core magnitude was about
+0.5, total magnitude about -1.5.
Hongbin Li at Xinglong Station, NAOC (40.396deg N, 117.578deg E,
mountain top; MPC code: 327) asked me via internet if there is a very
bright comet in the western sky at 11:34. But he said that he found
that object about 20min earlier.
The 0.8-m Tsinghua-NAOC telescope had pointed in turn to 179P and
150P since 11:40, but found it was neither of them.
Yiran Wu reported the object, especially the core, was rapidly
fading, at 11:43. And could no longer found it since ~11:59. Hongbin
Li also found the object was expanding, decaying and slowly moving
toward the north, and finally disappeared to naked-eye at 12:14, near
382 Per.
Tony Beresford
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive:
http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 13 2008 - 13:55:58 UTC