Here's a brief compilation of observations of the reentry seen by many Peninsula Astronomical Society Members and others on Saturday evening, July 1st. form California. The culprit was very likely the Raduga 26 Rocket Motor, an almost 2 ton piece of "debris". If anyone has any additional details (times, altitude, azimuth or stars the object passed, etc.) please send me an E-mail. Was anyone lucky enough to photograph or video tape it? Rick Baldridge rick.baldridge@wj.com _________________________________________________ July 1, 2000 Hi all: earlier tonight at 10:30pm PDT (Saturday night) all of us at Henry Coe State Park , (approx. 37.19, -121.49, -7 from GMT) watched a large piece of space debris go from one end of the sky to the other, with pieces breaking off behind it. There was also another straggler flying a few degrees farther back. The wildest stuff any of us had seen. Paul Mortfield ___________________________________________________________________ Went to Grant Ranch last night (37.34, -121.72), and caught a ring-side seat for the same show from the other side (we figured it would be visible from Coe, and probably the Peak... glad some other folks saw it, as I'm sure lots of folks won't believe it went slowly from horizon to horizon..) Does anyone have any idea what it was yet? Absolutely the most spectacular thing of that sort I've ever watched... and watched ... and watched... Akkana caught it in the eyepiece of her 13.1-inch, and said it was fragmenting off the front piece all the way, which was the naked-eye impression too. Woo! Dave North (President, San Jose Astronomical Association) ______________________________________________________________________ We were up at Oakridge Observatory (37.2039, -122.0539)and saw the same object with at least one large piece fall off. It was absolutely fantastic! Due to its relatively slow speed, we thought it might be a rocket that was staging from an airborne launch. Happened around 10:22 PM PDT. Perhaps Rick B. can enlighten us on this when he gets back. Ken Lum ______________________________________________________________________ Mojo and I were at Yosemite National Park with the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers and got to watch the horizon to horizon "fire-works" with a large crowd of stargazers at Glacier Point (37.71, -119.57). Mojo was lucky to have binoculars at the time and watched it - watched while the pieces blew off, and watched until the show was over. We were of the opinion at the time that it was a re-entry of some man-made object. It was way cool, that's for sure! Jane Houston Jones San Rafael, CA ______________________________________________________________________ Annette and I were camped east of Mono Lake near Adobe Valley (37.93, -118.64) and saw it too. It was still considerably to the east of us and (I'm guessing) about 45 degrees up at highest pass. It appeared to go SSW to NNE. Maybe we can roughly calculate how high and where? My jaw dropped when I saw it!!.... Bill Feiereisen ______________________________________________________________________ On further investigation, it appears that some of you saw the Raduga 26 aux motor re-enter, a piece of space junk weighing 2000 kg which had been up there for 10 years, which re-entered a few days earlier than predicted. Space junk catalog or "US Space Command ID" #21025 (sounds official, doesn't it!), which some of you might have even seen it when it used to be an ordinary satellite. Fred Sammartino, PAS Member ______________________________________________________________________ ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Thu Jul 06 2000 - 10:38:03 PDT