Damsel and I were out in the courtyard to watch the overflight of the International Space Station this evening. It was still pretty light out and I wanted to see if I could see Sirius in Canis Major as a gauge for the predicted magnitude of the ISS at -1.9. Sirius is magnitude -1.46, a little less bright than the satellite.
Image: Similar fireball photographed over Russia.
When I turned my attention eastward to look at Sirius, a bright meteor streaked across the sky, bright white initially and turning to orange and breaking into fragments as I watched. It was gone by the time I called to Damsel to come and look. This is the first fireball meteor we have seen in Arizona and the first one I, personally, have seen in over 20 years of looking up. The image in this post is not of the event we witnessed tonight, but a stock image of a fireball seen over Russia in the past.
In scanning local news reports, I have not seen any mention of this event. The good news is that Damsel and I both saw a nice ISS pass which makes three out of four in this recent series of evening passes. One was rained out earlier in the week.
We like to keep looking up. The stars here are usually spectacular and we see the Milky Way most clear nights.
Wonder if it was some space junk reentering?
That crossed my mind that it might be space junk. It had a flat trajectory from north to south and broke up into pieces just before it went invisible. Very spectacular!
Hmmmm….North-to-South flight path.
Sounds like a sun-synchronous satellite or booster….
I don’t know where to go and find out about space junk re-entering the atmosphere. Do you?
Several of these sites have pretty good info. When I was working at Sea Launch one of the things the Range Manager did was to coordinate “close approaches” of the ISS and incoming “junk” that NASA and the DoD knew about.
https://www.google.co.id/?gws_rd=cr,ssl&ei=M4u1Vq6dGYu4jwPB5orAAw#q=space+junk+reentry