I was taking SQM (Sky Quality Meter) measurements in Joshua Tree National Park in the Cholla Gardens on Thursday evening together with Devon Slaain, Head Astronomer at www.stargazingjtree.com. The time stamp was 9:23 PM:
Image 1: Still image Unknown Object
I am posting this clip with it to give you a sense of timing, duration, and direction in the sky. The skyglow is Palm Spring, looking West, moving Southwest, to South.
Video 1: Link to 1:50 minute clip of object.
The specifications for the object are the following:
Time: 9:23 PM from Joshua Tree NP looking West, Southwest
Astronomical Twilight end: 9:27 PM
20 to 30 degrees above the horizon for the duration, parallel to the horizon
Magnitude: -5 (brighter than Venus)
Length of trail: 2-3 degrees
No breakup in the trail
No scheduled rocket launches from Vandenberg that evening.
Having guided hundreds of nights of stargazing tours, we both were flabbergasted. We have seen Venus, Mercury, and other planets at dusk, Falcon 9 rocket launches, meteors, meteor showers, fireballs, satellites, ISS passes, airplanes, drones, and helicopters. But this was a first. Over the years, I have also seen plenty of videos in UFO groups, except when they post videos; their first is UFOs and aliens. As an astronomer practicing science, you must exhaust all other possible explanations before you go down the alien route, even with The Three-Body Problem being popular on Netflix.
We had no comparisons, except maybe rocket launches that look similar and are close to Vandenberg. It could be a launch or a Falcon 9 landing, but there were no official launches. Plus, the observation from Joshua Tree did not show the typical plume-structure (Image 2 below), and therefore, a rocket launch was ruled out.We posted it in several Astronomy Club groups, and here are the responses:
Alien spaceship
The TARDIS! 🤣 (Note: The TARDIS (/ˈtɑːrdɪs/; acronym for "Time And Relative Dimension In Space") is a fictional hybrid of a time machine and spacecraft that appears in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and its various spin-offs.)
Stray photon torpedo…
Looks like something reentering to me. Or a large meteor.
Son of Jor-El coming from planet Krypton.
It looks like something entering the earth's atmosphere to me... Maybe a satellite that is de-orbiting?
I see several California reports of long-duration fireballs (Note: the longest was 20 seconds; amsmeteors.org)
Looks like a de-orbiting satellite (three comments)
Considering all the comments and the observation characteristics and excluding conspiracy theories about UFOs, the most likely explanation is that the observation is a re-entering, de-orbiting satellite. Below is an image of a Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg, an image taken from Southwest Utah. You can identify the typical sperm-like shape. Just kidding, it is called the plume. It happens when the rocket reaches higher altitudes where the air pressure is much lower, and the exhaust plume from the engines begins to expand significantly. This results in a ballooning effect, creating a much broader and more diffuse plume. T
Image 2: Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg on June 23, 2024
How much orbital debris is there in Earth's orbit?
According to NASA, more than 25,000 objects larger than 10 cm exist. The estimated population of particles between 1 and 10 cm in diameter is approximately 500,000, and the number of particles larger than 1 mm exceeds 100 million. However, a 10cm object will not produce a large tail like this and will not be visible for this long. More like a fireball, they would brighten for seconds, not 1:50 min.
Image 3: Screenshot from Wall-E; Copyright: Pixar.
There are regulations on de-orbitting decommissioned spacecraft if you are interested: https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/deorbit-systems/.
Image 4: Reality. A computer-generated image of objects in LEO that are being tracked (2019), according to https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/photo-gallery/.
Final resolution based on evidence and shared comments: de-orbiting satellite.
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