Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Rocket Fuel Dump




While taking out the trash one night I noticed what I thought to be a VERY bright comet. Excitedly I tried to get online to identify. My family got excited if only by my excitement and upon returning I found it moved VERY far relative to the background stars. Confirming this with some binoculars I grabbed my camera, a Canon XTi with the following settings for the attached shot.

10sec
f/5.6
ISO 1600
200mm fl

The URL has an animated sequence in shockwave format which was taken with the same setup and these settings:

http://www.mediafire.com/?3z3ymndt0mn (~20MB in size)

10sec
f/4.5
ISO 1600
28mm fl

Keep in mind this is probably not an artifact as it was tripod mounted. You see a tree branch in the upper left that doesn't move from frame to frame and the object moves different than the hazy and clouds do!?

Could this be a glowing gas caused by a meteorite? Direction of the *object* was relatively in the NW of my local area and it seems that the 'tail' heads back to the zenith / east?

Time of sequence was ~2007-12-10T07:05:26 to 2007-12-10T07:12:41

My local lat & long is ~ 78W by 35N



Good reference: http://www.cloudynights.com

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