The Asteroid/Comet Connection's
daily news journal about
asteroids, comets, and meteors

Today's issue status: done

• News briefs – meteor news, bits & pieces
• Risk monitoring – no news

Cover – Peter Birtwhistle at Great Shefford Observatory in England writes: During the confirmation process for C/2004 P1 (NEAT), I took two sets of images binned 2x2, but then, to make a triplet of positions, I exposed a final set at 1x1 binning for maximum resolution, seen here, suspecting it might be a comet. The comet extended across about 7 pixels, whereas restacking with zero motion and checking stars of similar magnitude, the stars were about 2 pixels wide, so I was fairly sure it was a comet, even though faint. It measured to be mag +20.3 on this stack of 35 30-sec. images. Yesterday's MPEC 2004-Q18 moved C/2004 P1's time of perihelion from April/May 2006 to August 2003.

Meteor news:  KXTV-TV Sacramento, California has an article posted yesteday evening dated Thursday reporting that a meteorite in three small pieces may have fallen into the yard of a Turlock residence “just before midnight” Monday, with the largest being the “the size of a grapefruit.”

Marco Langbroek, who has investigated such claims in Europe (see “When meteorites aren't”), says Several things in the story do not add up. The picture is not very clear, but definitely does not look like a fresh meteorite. Still warm and even smoking several hours afterwards? Even fresh-fallen meteorites do not emit smoke upon ground impact. 137 grams is much too little weight for an object of the size shown in the picture.

The Turlock Journal has more details today, but they are similar and have the same problems. Dr. John Bradley, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP), told the paper that the lab has volunteered to do an identification. “I cautioned the family that the majority of reports like this turn out to be something off an airplane, metal slags, rocks or all sorts of odd things. Based on the description that was given to me, it doesn't sound like it is a meteorite.”

A check with Wayne Watson finds that his and Dave Kenyon's all-sky cameras, about 135 and 105 miles north of Turlock (170-220 km.), did not catch anything late Monday night. (The Dave Kenyon URL at Sierra College is new, with lots of images and movies.)

Bits & pieces:  JPL Solar System Dynamics computers were off line for awhile today in a planned outage, including Sentry risk pages and Horizons.

The Spitzer Space Telescope site has brief item explaining resolution as compared among space infrared telescopes and 2MASS.

Risk monitoring 21 August

At last check there is no news to report in risk monitoring. The JPL NEO Sentry site and related pages were off line for awhile today in a planned outage, but were back up by midnight UTC.