About 6:45 PM EST tonight my daughter and I were climbing out of our car and starting across the parking lot toward the apartment. I happened to look at the sky. There, almost straight overhead and slightly to the west, was what looked like an extremely bright comet. By bright, I mean that the nucleus of the comet was almost three-quarters as bright as Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. The wide tail spread out toward the west; I’d say it was about the size of a fingernail at arm’s length. We live in a pretty light-polluted place, but you couldn’t miss it. If you looked up, you saw it.
That’s odd, I thought. I didn’t know Comet Holmes was that bright. And the last time I heard it was in the constellation Perseus. This was about a sixteenth of the sky away from Perseus. Was I seeing a normal star through high cirrus clouds? Nope; there are no comparable stars in that part of the sky.
Still, something seemed off about it. I didn’t realize until later that the tail of the comet was fanning out toward the sun. Comet tails always stream out away: they’re like windsocks in the solar wind.
A neighbor was resting against one of the garages after jogging. I pointed up and called to him. Both of us assumed it was probably Holmes, although that didn’t seem really possible given the position and magnitude. Could there have been another, unknown and incredibly bright comet that just swooped in tonight? Or did something big happen to Holmes? It’s exploded unexpectedly several times on this pass through the inner solar system. My daughter and I ran inside to get my telescope. Chances like this don’t come around very often.
I’ve observed four comets in my life, and this was by far the biggest one. I alerted my nephew, and we dragged the scope outside. I set up on the sidewalk and looked up. It was dimmer. The nucleus was no longer a shining point of light. My neighbor concurred. And it didn’t seem to be in the same position as it had five minutes ago.
I grabbed my wide-angle lens and screwed it in place. I hadn’t had time to align my spotter scope, so it took a couple of minutes of sweeping back and forth before I found my target.
I knew right away that I wasn’t looking at a comet. The “tail” came down to a tiny point like the tip of a narrow wedge; it wasn’t expelled gas surrounding a nucleus. This had no internal nucleus at all.
The edges of our vision are more sensitive to dim light, so I used an averted gaze to try and make out any internal structures (it’s an old astronomer’s trick). Sure enough, I saw a faint point of light like a barely-visible star well out past the tip of the wedge. That’s like no comet I’ve ever seen.
Animation of the object sketched from memory. Background stars are only to illustrate apparent motion; they do not correspond to actual stars.
It was moving.
I could see it sliding past the stars at maybe 30 degrees an hour. The sky normally slides across a telescope field of view unless you’ve got a motorized drive, which I could never afford. The earth revolves through 360° in just a smidgen over 24 hours, so the stars seem to move at fifteen° per hour (360/24). The mysterious object was crossing my telescope’s field of view about twice as fast as a normal star.
What the hell was I looking at? No comet I’ve ever heard of moves that fast. This had to be something in orbit.
My neighbor wondered if it was the Shuttle. I told him the launch planned for Sunday had been scrubbed until January. Was it the International Space Station? No, it couldn’t be that either. Both the shuttle and the space station are in low orbits; they cross the sky in a few minutes. This had moved a fraction of that distance in ten minutes.
I let my daughter, nephew and neighbor take a quick look, but I didn’t want to lose track of it in the scope, so most of the time I had my eye glued to the eyepiece trying to keep it in the middle of my field of view. I noticed another point of light moving along with it, just to the side of the gas wedge. It hadn’t been there before, and five minutes later was gone as well. Twice I saw a flash of light from the gas wedge; my daughter (who is seven years old) was watching through binoculars the second time and exclaimed just as I saw the flash.
It was getting fainter, and it was just past the zenith and moving toward the North-Northeast. My telescope is a Dobsonian mount, and I’d happened to position it so that it couldn’t follow the movement any longer. I had to take my eye away and reposition the scope, and by the time I got back to the eyepiece I couldn’t find it anymore. It was too faint.
We watched it naked-eye for a few more minutes, until it was just a nondescript smudge in the sky, much like the Andromeda galaxy from the suburbs.
As I packed up, more and more things puzzled me. This was apparently something that blew up or got hit, and it did so in high orbit. But why were the gas and (I’m assuming) debris so directional? Why did it have a tail, in other words? Something moving against the stars in the background like that is almost certainly pretty close to Earth. The time scale of what we witnessed was very short, far too brief for solar wind to have swept the material away, and besides, it was pointed in the wrong direction. Given the rate at which it dimmed, I probably first glimpsed it within fifteen minutes of the event, whatever it was.
I don’t think our atmosphere was the reason for the tail, since for air to have swept the gases away it would have had to be in a low orbit, at least as low as the ISS and probably much lower. It would have zipped across the sky and vanished over the horizon in less than two minutes.
It was almost like gas and debris were spewing from something.
I really have no idea what the hell we saw, and have seen nothing about it on the internet or news. I sent an email to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena giving the details, along with my estimates of the Right Ascension and Declination of the initial observation and where the object ended up. (I made a mental note of the orientation of Cassiopeia so that I could approximate the positions when I got back to my computer and could run an astronomy program.)
As I see it, it was probably one of three things: a satellite getting smacked by a meteoroid and blowing up, another Chinese military orbit-sanding experiment, or a space rock impacting another space rock. (We’ve got a close approach by a small asteroid tonight, although the apparent motion I saw does not jibe with the distance to the asteroid, which is over eight times the distance to the moon. In fact, the apparent motion rules the asteroid out completely. The moon does not appear to move against the stars, so why would something eight times as far away do so?)
But there are problems with the explosion or impact theories also. The wedge-shape of the gas/debris doesn’t really fit; violent releases of energy such as those would send material out in all directions. Even if the main force of the energy was tightly focussed in one direction, a clean wedge would not have been the result.
And if the Chinese were doing another of their horrific orbital experiments (thanks a WHOLE LOT for adding to the space junk problem, guys!) then why would the main show take place over the eastern seaboard of the United States?
Whatever it was, it was strange. I’ve been poking telescopes into the sky for forty years, and I’ve never seen anything like it, nor can I come up with an explanation that completely fits what I saw. Something blew up in the sky tonight. Does anyone have information? Or even a plausible theory?
Special Just-The-Facts-Ma’am Update: As “someone” was kind enough to point out, the comet-like object was a classified military Atlas V rocket dumping fuel.
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