by Akkana
Dave North wrote:
About 10:30 (okay, I didn't look at my watch) something started burning across the horizon, starting in the vicinity of Scorpius from our point of view. It was lowish, and incredibly slow ... much slower than the typical meteor.Shouts started immediately, of course, and Ak said she thought it would be like most meteors, and gone by the time she looked, so she didn't bother right off the bat.
But I looked anyway, reflexively, and didn't miss much.
There were two obvious sections -- a brighter leading flare with a somewhat dimmer piece maybe 10 degrees behind it. About halfway across the sky, the dimmer object seemed to crap out.
As it turns out, there was a lot more than that going on ...
But the main section just kept going. It took long enough that the 20 or so folks present had an extended conversation as it crept across the sky. We thought the main section looked like it might be calving slightly, and Ak recovered her presence of mind faster than anyone else and tracked the last half of it's passage through her 13.1-inch dob. She was able to report that in fact it was blowing chunks all the way out...
I had a 25mm Plossl in the dob, so the field was fairly wide. It was easy to find: just point the finder a bit ahead then move to the eyepiece and catch it as it came by. I tracked it most of the way across the sky, from above Sagittarius to somewhere in southern Aquila (I'm guessing -- I was looking in the eyepiece and not at constellations) when it got too low to track easily (and got much fainter -- when I stood up from the 'scope and looked naked-eye, it was probably 4th or 5th magnitude by then, vs, oh, maybe minus five or six when it was high?) This took a minute or more -- very slow by meteor standards.
Interesting that the report that Matt quoted reported a tail with a "ghostly green cast" just before it burned out. It was pink for us, but just before it disappeared, it got much fainter and the pinkish color seemed a lot less obvious.
The weirdest thing about it was the little fragments travelling with it. If this was a meteor gradually splitting up, I'd expect to see smaller bits separating and then following slightly different trajectories. But this followed a very straight line, and so did the tiny pieces splitting off of it every few seconds, and the bigger piece that had split off early and was trailing it by several degrees. Each of these small pieces left a trail of its own, which looked extremely parallel to the trail of the main piece. There was even a small piece preceding the main chunk, which had its own trail which blended in to the main trail.
A slightly processed sketch of what it looked like in the 13.1" dob (including the pink color) is at: http://www.shallowsky.com/images/sketch/ufo.jpg Figure it's about a degree of arc from the leading piece to the pair back behind the main piece.
I thought "it has to blow any time now" and maybe give the best Fourth Of July fireworks show ever,
None of us heard anything indicating an impact, either, and didn't hear anything the next day. After it disappeared, someone turned on the radio to a local talk station, and apparently they had already gotten thousands of "What the heck was that?" calls (but no one knew).
