Mystery cloud over the U.S. and Canada

[Guest guest]

(It sure looks like a barium chemtrail to me? Elaine)

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http://www.space.com/spacewatch/mystery_cloud_040901.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Mystery Cloud’

Appears Over Eastern U.S. And Canada

By Joe Rao

SPACE.com's Night Sky Columnist

posted: 01 September 2004

07:44 am ET

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

John Bortle, a well-known amateur

astronomer with over four-decades of experience of sky observing first

caught sight of the cloud at 9:03 p.m. EDT from his home in Stormville,

New York. Initially, he thought the cloud was as bright as zero or

first magnitude and upon examining it carefully with binoculars,

thought that it " ... resembled the petals of a day lily." By 9:30

p.m., he reported that the cloud had faded completely from his view.

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.

Other reports, received as far west as

Toronto tell of people who initially thought that what they were seeing

was the moon behind a cloud. Typical was the comment: "For a second I

thought it was the moon, then I realized the moon was in the east."

What was it?

Not a few people who saw this strange,

expanding cloud thought that it might have been an atmospheric

experiment sent aloft by a sounding rocket. 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!