[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
(meteorobs) Meteor or Satellite Decay?
Last night at about 5:20 AM, -07:00, I saw a slow meteor or space
debris move accross about 90 degrees of the sky in about five seconds.
I first saw it just northwest of Cassiopeia moving slowly toward the
east passing near my zenith to just west of Orion. Ed Cannon of SeeSat
and meteorobs noted in a post on:
http://earthsky.worldofscience.com/BBS/Observers-Notebook/171X0.html
that space debris normally travels west to east, the direction of my
sighting, and predictions of Alan Pickup, who makes predictions of
decaying satellites on SeeSat-L newsgroup, had the Russian satellite
Raduga 104 decaying the evening before, in the time of about 9:30
local time and was seen in Oregon and Northern California within
limits of his prediction. Maybe what I saw was another piece of the
satellite that survived several more orbits. I posted a question to
Alan about that, or it was a very interesting meteor.
In general the "meteor" moved slowly, was yellow and white,
developed a white fragment in the tail after a small burst. I heard no
sound but I did check the time inside the house. The meteor was dim,
guess of magnitude +2 or +3, nothing like the bright debris of the
night before 300-500 miles north except for the long travel. I had my
binoculars and the time it turned out, but I decided not to chance
losing the object in searching for it. Darn. Been tempted to turn in
an observation report on clouds, LM, RA, DEC etc, been too long
without clear skies. Got lucky last night, waited out cloud cover and
spots to nearly full clearing at 05:10 AM.
Lat. 33.1983 Dave English
Long. -117.3767 Oceanside, California
To UNSUBSCRIBE from the 'meteorobs' email list, use the Web form at:
http://www.tiacdot net/users/lewkaren/meteorobs/subscribe.html