The Younger Daughter is a teacher at a private school here in LA and tonight as part of their end-of-the-year activities they had a sleepover night at the school. She asked if I would be interested in bringing some telescope gear to the school so her students could look through them.
Of course I will do that! (See that hill in the distance on the right side? That’s where Kobey Bryant’s helicopter crashed a few years back.)
While we were waiting for it to get fully dark, we saw the strangest thing pass overhead. It rose due west at about 21:05 and passed almost straight overhead, maybe a little bit to the south of us. It had this butterfly pattern to it and when I first saw it I thought the coastal fog was starting to roll in and this was a 737 going into Burbank with its landing lights illuminating the fog. It was BRIGHT!
I soon realized that it couldn’t be a jet, it was moving much too fast. I grabbed the binoculars and could clearly see a bright pinpoint at the center, with twin “jets” of some sort coming out both sides. Give its speed and path from due west to due east, it was clear that it had to be in orbit, not in the atmosphere. Given the “jets,” I think that this was probably an upper stage from a rocket, venting excess fuel.
This was it almost to the eastern horizon, just before the “jets” stopped and it faded from view.
I checked when I got home. There was a SpaceX Falcon9 launch out of Florida at 19:37, launching Starlink satellites into the “6-64” shell. Given the launch about 98 minutes earlier, the timing is close enough for government work. I’ve heard of folks over Texas seeing SpaceX upper stages venting after launch, and this would have been over them just a few minutes after it went over us, so while I’ve never seen this phenomenon before, I’ll keep an eye out for it in the future!!
The stargazing, on the other hand, sort of sucked. ALL of the planets are in the morning sky, the Moon doesn’t rise until midnight, the bright winter constellations have all set, the bright fall constellations of the southern sky haven’t risen yet, there was haze, we were in the middle of the city, and there were way too many lights all around. We ended up looking at Vega a lot, which is easy to see but boring.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 