(meteorobs) Leonid Meteor Shower - Bright Meteor or What?

[Russell Milton]

Hello,

I have recently acquired a number of almost all-sky images taken during the Leonid meteor shower (Monday morning, Nov. 17, 2014), using a Samyang 8mm f/2.8 fisheye lens on a Sony NEX-5N camera. These images were of 35-second duration with 2 seconds between images, overall 326 covering some 3 hours, 10 minutes. On two adjacent images there was a bright moving object of uncertain identity. I used DeepSkyStacker to composite these two onto a single image as shown below. 


Based on the total length of the trail (on a computer monitor) and the length of the two-second gap, I estimated the total time involved in the entire trail to be 8.8 seconds:
Total length of entire trail = 145 mm
Length of 2-second gap = 33 mm (thus 16.5 mm per second).
Total time of trail = 145 mm  ÷ 16.5 mm per second = 8.8 seconds

Here are some points to consider and some questions I have had:
The curve of the trail is largely due to severe distortion (*see photo below) caused by the Samyang 8 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens.
The time of less than 9 seconds seems too short for an airplane to have covered that much sky. 
While I was not looking at that part of the sky when the trail was produced, I heard no sound of a fast moving, low elevation airplane.
Why did the light go out after just nine seconds? It would seem that would not be the case for an aircraft. The total length of time covered by the composite exposure is 72 seconds (35 sec. 1st exposure + 2 sec. interval between exposures + 35 seconds 2nd exposure). Yet the moving light lasted only 9 seconds.
Two flashes appear in the upper half of the trail but not in the lower half - hard to reconcile with an airplane.
Nine seconds seems very long for a fireball meteor. But perhaps it was very slow moving.
* Here’s an example of the distortion caused by the fisheye lens:



I posted some of my Leonid images on the DPReview Astrophotography forum. There has some discussion there as to the identity of this object. Perhaps you would like to review the discussion found on the following link:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/54768726

I would appreciate hear what some of you say as to the identity of this object.

Best Regards,

Russ Milton
re.milton at frontier.com


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