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

Today's issue status: done

• News briefs Berthoud fall, crater news
  & other meteor news
• Risk monitoring

Cover: Imagery of comet C/2004 S1 (Van Ness) from the night of 3 October by Peter Kocher at Naef Observatory in Switzerland. This is a composite of thirty 20-second exposures stacked in Astrometrica, made with a 0.5m Hypergraph telescope. See yesterday about a call for astrometry for this comet to help prepare for radar observation.

Berthoud fall:  Continuing with news from yesterday about an October 5th meteorite fall in Berthoud, Colorado, there is an article today at KMGH-TV Denver that links to a video account by the eyewitnesses, as well as articles at the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. [Thanks to Jeff Brower and Marco Langbroek for help with catching these links.]

Crater news:  BBC has an article today about the Lake Bosumtwi crater in Ghana, in western Africa, described as being about 11 km. (6.8 miles) wide, created a million years ago by a kilometer-size asteroid — “the youngest large impact crater we have on Earth” and “very well preserved.” And the lake has well preserved sedimentation strata holding “an unrivalled record of tropical weather going back through several ice ages.”

Other meteor news:  An item at WISH-TV Fort Wayne, Indiana yesterday shows an image of a possible fireball, but also reports that it may have been just a brightly-lit aircraft contrail. Marco Langbroek concurs with that possibility based on the still image, but notes a thread on the SeeSat mailing list in which Ted Molczan has been telling today about looking into the possibility that this was the decay of a Russian Proton-K Auxiliary Motor (see a prediction). Molczan found the original report from WANE-TV from yesterday and a lead-in that gives a time of “5:30 Sunday.” For this to have been the re-entry, he told the list that the actual time would have had to have been “within a few minutes of 20:12 UTC (4:12 PM EDT),” or 3:12pm EST. And figuring out what hour is being talked about isn't easy this time of year in Indiana, where most of the state, including Fort Wayne, are in the Eastern time zone, but some parts are in the Central time zone, and various parts don't observe daylight savings, as Chris Jones tried to explain.

Risk monitoring 12 Oct.

The Tuesday Daily Orbit Update MPEC carries observation of 2004 TN1 from Consell Observatory in Spain last night, and today NEODyS and JPL raised their risk assessments for this object, which JPL estimates to be on the order of 170 meters/yards wide.

The Minor Planet Center Last Observation page is showing that Beaconsfield Observatory in England caught 2004 TL10 this morning.