Since the view from San Antonio would have been so low on the horizon, I had specifically driven to a spot just north of Waco to witness the reentry. I took the drive bacause it was a daylight reentry -- which I had never seen -- and because non-ISS missions are rare these days (ISS missions don't reenter over Texas). This put me somewhere around 80 miles south of Columbia's path. I caught sight of it at 7:58am local time, but it was already about 30 deg above the horizon. It was a bright spot with a slightly greenish glow around it. Almost immediately I saw a bright piece detach from it and fall behind. A little later, two more, nearly simultaneous. Then another. And so on. The best my brain did was to think it *looked* like it was breaking up, not that it actually *was* breaking up. The thought of a disaster was so far from my mind that I didn't even slightly consider the reality. I followed the main glow and contrail until 8:01am when the trail got too close to the Sun in the east for comfort. But it did look like the contrail just ended, but that fact didn't fully register with me either. I heard the sonic boom at 8:05am. It was only after being back on the road and hearing about it on the radio that the sickening reality made sense. Robert Fenske, Jr. rfenske@swri.edu Sw |The Taming the C*sm*s series: Southwest Research Institute /R---\ | Signal Exploitation & Geolocation Div | I | |"The Martian canals were the San Antonio,Texas USA ph:210-522-3931 \----/ | Martians' last ditch effort." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Feb 01 2003 - 15:22:17 EST