Queen's shooting star was actually meteor, not SpaceX junk The fireball spotted charging through the night-time skies of Scotland and Northern Ireland this week, initially thought to have been some fallen SpaceX hardware, was a meteor after all, according to the UK Meteor Network. Skywatchers were shocked by a bright object whizzing by overhead late on Wednesday. A video capturing the …
I saw some shooting stars last night
I wished on them but they were only satellites
It's wrong to wish on space hardware
I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care
That's all you need to rule out Starlink, and most other satellites. Launching towards the East gets you nearly an extra 1000MPH free of charge from the earth's rotation. No satellite operator would give that up unless they really had to. There are some in polar orbits, but then it would be going north or south with nowhere near that much of a westerly component.
Our initial analysis based on had it moving more due north and at 4km/s but the angles were bad on the cameras which were quite close to each other. Once my colleagues found additional data from cameras with diffrerent views we reanalysed it and got more accurate results which led to a re-evaluation of the conclusion. Science at work :)
Yes, and it's nice for a change. Too much of the "This is the way it is, period, and you may not question it." Then a week later, "This is the way it is, period, and you may not question it." and the premise is the polar opposite of last week's proclamation. Science by man is not absolute and is not necessarily correct, and is just the best guess available using current tools. Unfortunately these days, science too often is what the person paying for it wants it to be. Proclaiming your science-derived guesses as absolute, indisputable fact that may not be challenged changes it from science to religion.
Me, I'm all for science, and I don't mind if you're guessing. If you're guessing, you're still investigating but if you're proclaiming then your mind just closed and you stopped being a scientist.
"Proclaiming your science-derived guesses as absolute, indisputable fact that may not be challenged changes it from science to religion."
Luckily, most science isn't like that and the published papers can be read, showing that. How the press spin the stories, or worse, how the PR from the company or Government sponsoring it might spin it is what leads to the "absolutist science" we keep seeing in the media.
...mutter, mutter ...grumble... "a remote, southern island of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland."
Since when do you need to tell people where Islay is? Surely everyone drinks Scotch? :-)
And it's only remote by US standards. It's got two ferry routes and an airport!!
Now, if you really want remote Hebridean islands...
Fiery meteors landing in the deep sea? I've read The Kraken Wakes and suffice to say if this is an invasion of that kind then they're not going to be able to manage their main strategy (deliberately melting the ice caps so the land is inundated) because we're already doing it ourselves! In your face, deep-living-aliens-from-maybe-one-of-Jupiter's-moons-or-wherever!
E.g. IIRC, "Creatures of the Abyss", Murray Leinster:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42901
I don't remember their long term strategy, however. But unlikely to be the alternative "use explosives to blow up all the land" like in the "War with the Newts", if that helps ...
Brightest I ever saw BY FAR - light the sky up like it was daytime (though maybe it only seemed that way with our eyes dark adapted wandering through a field far any bright city lights)
About an hour NW of London (in Wroxton) would have been late June 1999 I believe.
I saw one once some time ago, from my back garden in Rugby, UK. It was interesting in that as it streaked across the sky, in an apparently North-South direction, it suddenly split up into a fan of smaller lights, presumably as it exploded. Complete silence, or at least couldn't be heard above the usual traffic noise from the adjacent Hillmorton Road.
Islay is an island in the Inner Hebrides which you can see from the mainland, so its hardly remote, except when the ferries are broken, which is often. St Kilda is remote.
Islay is where most of the best single malt whisky comes from, with the exception of Jura which is reachable by a short and interesting ferry ride from Islay, Jura is the best single malt whisky IMO.
Was Christmas Eve of 2011 or 12, not sure which. Was in southern Switzerland. Looked out of window and saw this huge ball of fire, moon sized, slowly burning its way across the sky. Must have been my location in relation to the meteor because it took about 20 seconds to cross the sky from west to east. When I first saw it, I thought it was a plane on fire but it was way to big. Unforgetable experience.
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