>I am an amateur astronomer and had the opportunity to spend a >couple hours observing last night (9/29-30) under dark skies from >my site 15 miles north of Duluth, MN. I have seen many meteors in >my time but last night offered something truly unusual. At 12:53 >a.m. I spotted a slow-moving, northward traveling "meteor" moving >from northern Cetus in the southeast clear across the eastern sky >disappearing some 10 seconds later 4 degrees above the >northeastern horizon. The object was yellow-orange, about mag. - >1.0 and left a continuous contrail as it leisurely traveled across the >eastern sky. I even had time to train the finder on my telescope on >it when it was very low in the north. Would I be right to assume this >was probably a piece of a satellite burning up? Were there any re- >entry predictions for yesterday evening? >Thanks for your help and comments! The apparent velocity of this object appears too high for it to be a decaying satellite. Neither can I find a decayer that could have been responsible for this report. The closest two are #26149 and #24238. the former (CBERS LM4 deb AK) may have decayed early on the 30th UTC (perhaps 02:00 UTC) though there was no published elset during its final day. In any case, its orbital plane took it nowhere near Duluth near the time of the observation. #24238 = Pegasus deb LM may have decayed at about 07:00 UTC on the 30th, but again there was no elset in the last day and the orbital plane was in the wrong place. Alan -- Alan Pickup / COSPAR 2707: 55d53m48.7s N 3d11m51.2s W 156m asl Edinburgh / SatEvo & elsets: http://www.wingar.demon.co.uk/satevo/ Scotland / Decay Watch: http://www.wingar.demon.co.uk/satevo/dkwatch/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Oct 01 2000 - 13:59:17 PDT