Telescope Reviews: The most phenomenal thing I have ever seen

... you mean "a little bit obscene" when our eyes are melting out of our skulls like watches in a Dali painting?

as Santa said to Ralphie in "A Christmas Story":

"You'll shoot your eye out, kid."

I'll pass on being an eye[less]witness to an atomic air blast.

But you make a good point, there's probably nothing more "phenomenal" (or more horrifying) than the spectacle of an atomic bomb exploding.

Even though I couldn't understand the full ramifications of such an explosion, after we had air raid drills at our school and followed the "Fallout Shelter" signs down to the basement and put our coats over our heads, I had nightmares about atomic bombs exploding over NYC (the Manhattan skyline was visible from a park in my town - which, btw, was also the site of a famous UFO sighting).

In fact, the two recurring nightmares I had as a child were running for shelter from "The Bomb" and being chased by flying saucers.

Returning to the topic of the OP... the most phenomenal man-made sky event I've witnessed (besides two airplanes crashing, which I will not describe) happened right after my club had wrapped up its monthly Skywatch at a local park.

There were only three of us left still dragging equipment to our cars, the club president, the Skywatch Czar, and me (new member recruiter or as I called the position - "star trooper recruiter").

I was on my knees packing up my Celestron 10x50 ED bins when the Czar cried out: What the [heck] is that? in Russian (I wrote it in Russian, but the CN server doesn't do Cyrillic letters so use Babelfish).

I looked up and saw he was pointing to several objects streaking across the sky, from west to east.

I counted five separate objects moving rather slowly across the sky, looking like five comets in fast motion.

I trained my bins on them and saw that there were also smaller objects streaking in the same formation, about a dozen in all. I could also see more colors - green, gold, and crimson.

At 10x, the brighter objects did look like a comet - a "coma" in front, a bright "nucleus" next, and a long bluish-white tail.

The first thing we wondered if there was a Space Shuttle in orbit, because the scene resembled the break-up of the Columbia.

We came to the consensus that thankfully, it was not, but we were still puzzled about whether this was a man-made object falling from orbit or a Bolide breaking up in the sky (and I don't mean the Swedish Guided Missile by that same name, Mark :-).

The whole thing took place in slow motion and seemed to last longer than it actually did. We tracked the objects for several minutes until they faded from sight over the horizon.

When we got home, we posted messages about the sky event on the club listserv, and one of our members, who follows satellites and rocket launches very closely, responded that it was a Russian rocket booster burning up.

The Czar posted a comment: oh, so that's what the [heck] it was! (in Russian, our club server does allow Cyrillic letters)

I think there's something very primeval about seeing unusual things in the sky.

For example, comets were thought to be portends of war.

To get back to Ron's comment, it might be no coincidence that the the first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, on July 16, 1945, and the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States was made by pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947, on a military search mission when he sighted a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington's Mt. Rainier.

Two weeks after Arnold's flight, the Roswell story broke, and UFO hysteria was on.

A spike in UFO reports occurred after the launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957.

It's also probably no coincidence that Orson Wells Halloween broadcast of the radio play of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" on October 30, 1938 caused such hysteria, having come on the heels of the greatest news event of 1938, which took place on September 29, when four powerful world leaders met at the Fuhrerhaus, in Munich, to redraw the map of Europe after Hitler annexed Austria.

Here's a prediction: 2012 will be a landmark year for seeing "strange things" in the sky. It might begin in 2011 or even next year.

The only object I'm hoping to see streaking across the night sky will occur on December 24 when Santa will be delivering a package to my house containing a 10x42 Nikon EDG. No, I have not been that good, rookie!

Thanks for that eyewitness report, Mark. They say that a picture paints a thousand words, but the sequence of reading your description first and then seeing the photo of what you had described was the most informative.

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B'rock, son of Grilka
Member of the House of Kozak
Klingon Poet-Warrior
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"The character of a Klingon poet-warrior is measured not only by the metal of his blade--but also by the mettle of his words."