Anyone who lives in the eastern part of the United States or Canada and gazing skyward on Tuesday evening may have noticed something strange in their west-northwest sky.
At around 9 p.m. EDT, a small, bright, silvery circular cloud of light suddenly appeared. Over the next 25 minutes, the cloud appeared to gradually expand and fade, finally becoming invisible to the unaided eye. Those who saw it, wondered exactly what it might have been.
From the North Fork of Long Island, Bill Bogardus and his wife were out observing when they took note of the cloud " ... about the size of the moon" in the northwest sky. "It was a roundish, yet not all that round, object drifting towards our location very slowly, slower that most satellites because it took at least twenty minutes to move from where we first saw it to pretty much our zenith."
After studying it for a while through an 8-inch telescope, Bogardus noticed two points of light, " ... like a satellite would appear, in line and above a jet of gas that seemed to come from them."
Observing from Ithaca, New York, Joseph Storch used 7x50 binoculars on the cloud and reported a star-like point or nucleus and four butterfly shaped petals radiating outward.
Over the years, those living along the US East Coast have been accustomed to occasionally seeing unusual brightly colored clouds caused when exotic chemicals such as barium and trimethylaluminum were released into the Earth's ionosphere by rockets launched from NASA's Wallops Island, Virginia site.
However, in this case it was the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office -- not NASA -- that was responsible for the unusual cloud formation on Tuesday night.
It was a fuel dump of the Centaur stage involved in the NRO-1 satellite launch from Cape Canaveral late Tuesday afternoon. Dumping excess fuel is the usual practice for all Centaur-booster assisted launches. It happens after spacecraft separation; the fuel bleeding off from a Centaur upper rocket stage on its second orbit after launch. Being just after nightfall, the cloud of fuel was still sunlit at that altitude.
And those who were fortuitously outside when the dump occurred, were the ones who saw this very unusual sight!
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/mystery_cloud_040901.html
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