At least, I figure it was part of Endeavor. It was moving slowly, burning extremely bright, and headed to the middle of the Pacific. This was around 7:50 PST. What did I see?
The only thing that is possible is the external tank. This re-entered near Hawaii 80 minutes after the launch and would have been crossing the Pacific from the West to the East. The launch was at 1:02pm Central Time. One suspects you saw a good sized meteor.
Was it the u?
Ack, I got the wrong time for the launch. 8:56:28 a.m. EDT was Endeavour’s launch time. The same basic parameters hold after that. The External tank will re-enter with a nice trail, about 80 minutes later, somewhere over the Pacific or Indian Oceans, and will be travelling from West to East.
Moving nice and slowly sort of eliminates a meteor… no?
A meteor can appear to be moving slowly depending on its trajectory relative to you. (If it looks like it’s not moving at all, duck.)
If it was moving east to west, it’s very unlikely that it was a man-made satellite. Satellites almost always go west to east, to take advantage of the fact that it’s already moving in the direction of the Earth’s rotation at launch. Unless there’s a specific reason, it doesn’t make sense to launch it in the other direction and require all of the additional fuel to counteract the rotational velocity.
Ah, thanks for the west-east insight. It was definitely headed west, and must have been at an extremely low angle, because it took about 2-3 minutes to completely clear the sky. So we’re thinking a meteor is the most likely explanation?