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(meteorobs) telescopic meteor?
Hi, list:
I've got a question for observers of telescopic
meteors.
I just got a call from one of our local deep sky
observers. He's fairly experienced, and was using a 13 inch Dob with a 32
mm ocular for what he saw last night at about 12:36 AM (5:36 UTC, April
6).
He described it as a faint, dark ("gray-brown"),
round blob with the appearance of cratering, about 5 to 8 minutes of arc in
diameter crossing the field of view (about a degree) in about 2 seconds.
He immediately looked up with the unaided eye to find it, but as might be
expected for an object that was faint in a 13 inch telecope, he saw
nothing. His field of view was in the vicinity of the Big Dipper, as he
was star hopping to M106 at the time.
From the description, the size and motion seem too
fast for any kind of near Earth object, and wrong for a telescopic meteor.
The motion seems possible for a satellite, but the size and time seem
wrong. My best guess at this point is that he saw a bird reflecting city
lights, dimly because he observes from the edge of town with a limited number of
lights nearby.
Have any of you ever seen anything like
this?
Dave Hostetter
Curator of the
Planetarium
Lafayette (LA) Natural History Museum &
Planetarium
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