(meteorobs) possible fireball in Portugal

[Tony Beresford]

At 16:35 5/06/04, you wrote:
>Dear All,
>
>Regarding the unindentified light over Portugal on June 1, 2004, now it
>looks to me that Sun was already too deep below horizon to illuminate
>possible airplane's contrail.
>Unfortunately I don't have software to calculate a height/altitude of the
>Earth shadow in the area of the event, but my rough estimations show that
>at 22.15 UTC June 1 Sun was about 22 degrees below local horizon at 38 N,
>8W.
>If so indeed the Earth shadow height was ~ 500 km which completely exclude
>any
>possibility of the solar illumination.
>
>Does anybody have software/program to calculate the Earth shadow height or
>the solar [altitude] angle at least?
Andrei,
I can confirm all your calculations above. Firstly just used a planetarium programme
(SkyMap Pro) to calculate solar depression angle, at 2215UT at latitude longitude 
above on June 1 as 22 degrees
Then an application of the Sine rule for the triangle gives
 h=  R( (1/sin 68) -1) where R= radius of Earth
which solves to 500Km 
Tony Beresford
PS Might not the aircraft detected be just a coincidence