NEO Fireball...? Did you see it?

[Woodsey65]

Hi,

Last night (25/09/08) HantsAstro at our observing session at INTECH, the group saw what appears to be a bright object travelling slowly across the sky at high altitude, leaving a long trail and it was breaking up. The sighting lasted for 30-40 seconds.

It was somewhere between Mag 0 and -2.

The direction was West to East at 20.56(UT) Universal Time or 21:56pm in the UK. Graham Green managed to capture an image which is now on our website. There is a little tripod shake but you can clearly see the trail and the break up... attached is a copy.

Was it man-made? the ATV from the ISS isn't due to re-enter until the 29th Sept.

Did it fully break up? It was heading towards Central Europe.

Did you see it? and where were you if you did as we are trying to build some data on what it was and where it originated from. Some 1200 objects pass through the Earth's atmosphere annually, and are seen by individuals but rarely are they seen by groups of observers or even imaged.

On our first real night out at INTECH, we've done both.

Please e-mail your sighting to us and any info you may have.

Planet Earth really is a Hard-Hat area...

Picture is also on the from page of our site:

http://www.hantsastro.org

(click to enlarge)

[starf]

what a great capture. there have been quite a few sightings of it http://stargazerslounge.com/index.php/topic,31891.0.html

can you please identify some constellations in your image and time and length of the exposure.

great capture.

regards

mike

[Woodsey65]

Will do, have reported the sighting to Space Guard UK and am getting all the info, including GPS, elevation.

Also we are reprocessing the image in 32 bit.

You can actually see it breaking up!

[NickH]

That's the sucker....

Great capture...

[G4AQB]

I'm near to Manchester and I also saw the object at the date and time given.

At the time I thought it was a 'shooting star' but it was a fireball with quite a long trail and I watched it for what seemed ages as it headed East still visible. Almost like a fiery ISS.

I told my wife what I had seen and we looked later on the local news and internet for clues, but no mention. :scratch: :scratch: :scratch:

Steve

[Woodsey65]

Hi Steve

I think we may be the only people that got an image of it. 6 of us saw it at the same time and so did several other members According to SpaceGuard UK, most of these events never get recorded in the UK, few are imaged and even fewer videoed. Radar doesn't always pick them up either. I spent ages trying to find out on the web and on TV, but nothing.

Couldn't have been one of the stages of the Shenzhou VII rocket, surely that would have splashed down in the North Pacific? Must have been a piece of space junk (we nicknamed it a fridge, as it must have been a substantial mass but smallish) as it was travelling slowly for a meteor, or it was a 'close call' of an even larger object. We saw it from the South Coast, 160 miles south of Manchester...

Should have the close ups to post soon and the might give us a clue.

Surreal.

Dave

[Bruce MacDonald]

Nice photo. The fact that it was relatively slow suggests that this was a manmade object; the natural fireballs I have seen have travelled very fast. Quite what it was though, I could not say. However there is a lot of space debris out there and you did well to get a picture.

[Woodsey65]

Thanks,

I'll pass the message on.Looks like we have an answer. It appears to be a Russian Proton M Rocket body.

http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Sep-2008/0213.html

According to records it launched 3 GLONASS GPSsatellites, successfully.

I looked further into itonce exploded 139 seconds after lift off and crashed in anup-populatedarea of Kazakhstan. It uses liquid Heptyl as a propellant, which iscarcinogenic, and is not very green... Another rocket body using the same fuel, failed the year before. These rockets are used a lot.

We may have the only picture of its re-entry.

Aren't these things supposed to break up over oceans?

Another one goes up later this month or November.