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Stardust not sighted from Santa Cruz
We attempted to view the Stardust reentry from Santa Cruz California,
from a site with unobstructed view of the northern horizon. Weather conditions were excellent; a few scattered clouds, but the northern horizon appeared to be cloud-free, major stars in circumpolar constellations were readily visible to the naked eye (limiting magnitude from about 3.5 to 4). We watched the northern sky from about 01:50 to 02:10 PST, however did not see any sign of the reentry. |
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Stardust not sighted from Santa Cruz
We attempted to view the Stardust reentry from Santa Cruz California,
from a site with unobstructed view of the northern horizon. That's not possible. A mountain range blocks your view of the northern horizon. If you were looking from Santa Cruz over those mountains, then you were looking somewhat high in the sky, too high to see Stardust. |
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Stardust not sighted from Santa Cruz
We attempted to view the Stardust reentry from Santa Cruz California,
from a site with unobstructed view of the northern horizon. That's not possible. A mountain range blocks your view of the northern horizon. If you were looking from Santa Cruz over those mountains, then you were looking somewhat high in the sky, too high to see Stardust. I sure hope my girlfriend isn't reading this group ("You got me up at 2 AM to look at this thing, AND IT WAS BLOCKED BY MOUNTAINS????" ;-)) But I don't think mountains were the problem. We weren't in Santa Cruz proper, but a few miles down the coast in Aptos, at lat 36.9764, lon -121.9121. Just went out again to the observation site to estimate the angle subtended by hills to the north - I don't have an inclinometer but I think it's just a few degrees. I also used Google Earth to estimate the obstruction angle; I think the northerly hills subtend 3 degrees at most as viewed from the site. According to the plot at http://reentry.arc.nasa.gov/elevation.jpg, Stardust should have reached a maximum elevation of 12 degrees or so as seen from our observing site, so the fireball should have cleared the hills by roughly 9 degrees. My leading theory at the moment is that the fireball was either dimmer than we expected and/or faster-moving than we expected. I was expecting something like the shuttle reentry that I once saw, which was as bright as Venus and with an angular velocity similar to that of a jetliner a few thousand feet up. Has anyone seen any posted descriptions of Stardust observations from California? Thanks, Tom |
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