On 15 Feb 2009 at 10:51, Aaron Brown wrote: > http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/02/15/fireball-over-te > xas/ As a newbie I have a question for this SeeSat-L list: We are in principle dedicated to observation of satellites, and this seems to include observation of outgoing space probes as well. Does our scope extend to observation of incoming satellite debris, as per the above citation? How about launch debris which never has achieved orbit? How can such observations be distinguished from meteor observations or even worse? For example, a couple of years ago, in England, I witnessed a spectacular fireball - bright blue head trailing red sparks - which I thought might have been some unusual firework. But I got in touch with an expert who acts as a clearing house for such observations, and he congratulated me on seeing that object, which actually had been about three hundred kilometers away over France and Belgium and had been photographed by several automatic cameras and seen by many observers. Conclusively, it came straight in from deep space, not from orbit. We are obviously not a group simply devoted to "observations of strange things in the sky", because I think UFO observations are definitely excluded. So what do we observe? My preference would be a limitation to man-made (or presumably man-made) objects in trajectories outside the atmosphere, and their incoming trajectories and debris. Thus excluding bolides and UFOs. Thomas Goodey ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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