Starship Asterisk*

Here is a streak just recorded on the Haleakala HL CONCAM. It looks a bit like a meteor but it has a very abrupt northern edge. The southern edge does trail off. It does not obviously point to Gemini, either. The most troubling is that the pixels to the East of the bright trail are strangely underluminous, indicating some sort of problem with the CCD. I look briefly on the corresponding Mauna Kea MK image, but could see no obvious counterpart. Here it is:


Note also that the edges of the image are missing due shielding added by the local HL people to prevent dewing inside the CONCAM optics. I have asked them to remove this shielding.
- RJN

Hi,
I'm new to this forum so bear with me if I'm not so technical in my description of something I saw in the night sky around Dec. 10, 2004.

I live in North Texas. On this particular night I happened to look out an upstairs window and see a very bright, long, whitish blue, streak going very fast across the sky. It was going from Northwest to Southeast.
The night was clear as I could see all the various constellations.

The interesting thing I thought was how long it lasted. As it streaked I ran into another room to continue the view out a back window and it still was going lightning fast until it almost reached the horizon and disappeared.

I have seen many meteors, meteorites before and this did not seem like a meteor simply because it took so many seconds (maybe 15-25?) to go across the sky compared to when you see a meteor in the literal blink of an eye.

I have also seen the Space Shuttle and ISS from my location and it resembled a similar trajectory as the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2000 (the one that had a female pilot) that sped over N. Texas which lasted about 10-15 seconds. However the space shuttle was not as bright nor did it have such a very long tail/streak across the sky much like the photo above. What I saw looked like this photo above.

How do you all go about figuring out what it could have been?

Thanks for any help you can give to this newbie.

I noticed a nice satellite pass on the CP Concam. Not sure what satellite it is, maybe Okean-O except that it is going NS and not SN.



Portions are also visible in the images both before and after the one pictured above. This one just looked the best and contained the largest visible streak.

Most likely a satellite pass. Heavens Above didn't get me anything matching, but they are known to occasionally miss a bird.
The 'disconnection' on the eastern edge is likely either overexposure on the CCD, but not enougth to cause it to overflow, or simply a tumble on the satellite presenting us a darker surface.