Paul Henney wrote:
The slowing of the tumble is actually more to do with a conductor (the
rocket) rotating and moving in a magnetic field (the earths) and slowing
due to hysteresis effects..basically an induced current makes the rockets
tumble slow down over time.

Had an interesting run-in with one of these in the summr of 2000.
I'd been following the SL-16 stage of the month visually from
home for a while. Then I got data from a CCD mosaic imager at the
Kitt Peak 4-meter telescope. In a 3-night period looking at
a single field far to the north, we got not only that SL-16
but an older one transiting the 0.5-degree field. I have a really
good light curve for that first one...

The stacked images went into the background material for a Hubble/Chandra/
Kitt Peak/Gemini/VLA press release. The stacking of multiple exposures
didn't quite erase all traces of one of the booster trails; looking carefully
at the big KPNO mosaics linked from
http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/c153/
(under Color Composite Images of Abell 2125) will show it in
the blue filter, where the
combining algorithm did not reject slightly high pixels.

Bill Keel