Reentry of CZ-2C R/B (NORAD 43521)

From: Robert McNaught via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_lists.seesatmail.org>
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:30:49 +0000
First picked up as a faint line, perhaps 5deg long, in my north at
18:40:00UT, just as my alarm went off. It took a few seconds before I
could separate out a red mag +2 stellar point at the front of the line,
which was just the train (wake). It was considerably lower in the sky
than the Quicksat ephemeris based on epoch 26059.496 and n=16.41
rev/day. Although I followed it visually and on video for over a minute,
no fragmentation became visible. It was unfortunate that it became lost
in cloud in my ESE as it would probably have been high enough to exit
shadow in the SE.

Various issues in observing it will delay any timed positions. Although
I took a video lasting 1m32s before it entered cloud, the video stopped
with a warning of a slow write speed. On the camera I can only playback
the first few seconds. I'm too tired to put the file on my laptop but
will do so after a few hours sleep. There is a faint line on my all-sky
camera low in the north that must be the reentry. The part I videoed
would be lost to the all-sky camera as it has a hill to the east from
which I did the observing.

FWIW, here are a couple of points along the line recorded on the all-sky
camera

J2000
RA 14h17.8m Dec +48.0d
RA 15h04.0m Dec +47.8d
uncertainty +/- 0.1d

Cheers,
Rob
Coonabarabran, NSW

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Received on Sat Feb 28 2026 - 11:31:23 UTC

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