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

From: Robert McNaught via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_lists.seesatmail.org>
Date: Sun, 1 Mar 2026 05:05:27 +0000
The video was OK when viewed on the laptop. Hopefully these positions, 
extracted by hand, are consistent. Essentially I just used visual 
techniques for close passage of the satellite to groups of stars. The 
head of the meteor was always a sharp stellar point with the train 
separated by a small gap as it's intensity enhanced. At 25 frames/sec, 
the relative times should be good to around 0.01sec, but the absolute 
accuracy is only ~1sec. The camera time was set by GPS immediately 
before observing.

43521 18 054D   9333 G 2026022818401544  26 15 150437 +475742 69 S+020
43521 18 054D   9333 G 2026022818402480  26 15 160144 +461348 69 S+020
43521 18 054D   9333 G 2026022818404512  26 15 175822 +362542 69 S+020
43521 18 054D   9333 G 2026022818405324  26 15 183358 +310700 69 S+020
43521 18 054D   9333 G 2026022818405420  26 15 183720 +303600 69 S+020
43521 18 054D   9333 G 2026022818410104  26 15 190156 +261836 69 S+020
43521 18 054D   9333 G 2026022818410316  26 15 190849 +245318 69 S+020
43521 18 054D   9333 G 2026022818410612  26 15 191806 +231212 69 S+020

Cheers, Rob


On 28/02/2026 19:30, Robert McNaught via Seesat-l wrote:
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Seesat-l mailing list
> https://lists.seesatmail.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l


_______________________________________________
Seesat-l mailing list
https://lists.seesatmail.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
Received on Sat Feb 28 2026 - 21:06:22 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Sun Mar 01 2026 - 05:06:22 UTC