On Mon, 15 Mar 2004 23:11:53 -0500, "Dave Bartolini"
wrote:

Did anyone in the New England area happen to see the meteor/satellite
flameout at around 7:30 this evening?

I was in Ware, Mass (reasonably close to the Quabbin reservoir). My daughter
was with me, and we were getting into our car when she shrieked "Cool! Look
at that!" By the time I turned around, the fireball was behind a house & a
tree, so I said that it was Venus that she was seeing. Venus looked nice
with a misty halo around it. In another second or so, the fireball came out
from behind the house. It was a large object followed by a smaller one. In
the 1/2 second that I watched it, I couldn't detect any loss of brightness.
It was a good 2 seconds at least from when my daughter called out to when I
lost sight of the object behind another house. She said that she saw it
break up when she first glimpsed it.

Based on its behavior, I'm guessing that it was a satellite breaking up on
reentry, but I'm not certain. It was indeed very cool.

I had similar reports from New York and Connecticut. There is a good chance this
was a component of a Russian weather satellite system, the Molniya-M Platform,
that had a predicted decay over the Eastern Seaboard at 7:31 EST (plus or minus
a day).

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com