It seems the fuel dump for the Centaur upper stage was seen from Bejing. Here are some reports by Hang Muen from the Bejing planetarium. Posted on the Comet-Obs list. Yiran Wu (39.979deg N, 116.299deg E, northwest suburb of Beijing) found the object in Aries by naked-eye and immediately reported to me at 11:21 UT (hereafter). Her estimation of total magnitude is about -2 ("somewhat bighter than Sirius"). I myself (39.883deg N, 116.617deg E) saw the object with a 12x60 binocular. The object had a typical cometary apperance with a slightly curved tail towards SE-E, at 11:24. Core magnitude was about +0.5, total magnitude about -1.5. Hongbin Li at Xinglong Station, NAOC (40.396deg N, 117.578deg E, mountain top; MPC code: 327) asked me via internet if there is a very bright comet in the western sky at 11:34. But he said that he found that object about 20min earlier. The 0.8-m Tsinghua-NAOC telescope had pointed in turn to 179P and 150P since 11:40, but found it was neither of them. Yiran Wu reported the object, especially the core, was rapidly fading, at 11:43. And could no longer found it since ~11:59. Hongbin Li also found the object was expanding, decaying and slowly moving toward the north, and finally disappeared to naked-eye at 12:14, near 382 Per. Tony Beresford ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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