Fire in the Sky!!

[oobiecoo]

My friends and I were were standing outside around 7 tonight and I happened to look into the sky and saw the strangest thing! Something that looked like a plane was flying pretty high and all of a sudden it had a trail of fire behind it and looked like it was going very fast. Then, it broke apart into several pieces, also on fire, that all seemed the same size as the orginal. The pieces began moving across the sky in different directions, kind of darting.... all the while the fires would go out and then come back. I also noticed several airplanes in the sky which is strange since its a fairly small town with a very small airport and that amount of air activity is not common. The whole thing seemed a few miles away and pretty huge! Did anyone else see this or know what it may be? I''ve looked online, at local news stations, even called the police station to see if they knew what was up. We thought it was maybe a space shuttle re-entering the atmosphere but I haven''t found anything that was scheduled for today... and the "darting" back and forth was a little strange for that. BTW, we were in College Station, tx.

 

[scarleta]

How fascinating!! Meteorites perhaps?

 

[luckystar112]

hmmmm well I''m in Houston and I DO know that the space shuttle has apparently been going in circles or something around us. At least it was a couple of weeks ago.....
BUT...the news advertised the exact time it would be flying overhead, so I went outside to see it, and it basically just looked like a big star floating across the sky (as in, it didn''t blink like a plane).
Actually, we annoyingly live right under the path of travel that the planes usually go, and for a while they were all flying REALLY low because of the shuttle being up there.

I have no idea what you saw in the sky. Maybe a UFO?

I saw something weird in the sky once, I may have posted about it here.
I was in Maine and just driving down the street, when I saw something HUGE in the sky way in the distance. Way bigger than the moon, and it was bright white...kind of shaped like a blimp. I kept trying to drive to where it was, but eventually the trees would block my vision, so I''d turn around and wait to see it in my rearview mirror and then go try and find it again. I did that like 3 or 4 times before it was finally GONE. No idea where it went. I went to the police station to ask them what it possibly could have been and they thought I was NUTS!!!! lol. But later (I was a senior in high school at the time) I was mentioning it to some friends at a high school party and a couple of them said they saw the same thing and thought they were going crazy.

 

[smitcompton]

Hi,
Last week an astronomer was on the news shows explaining that a comet was within our sight and might be the only one we would see in our lifetime. Sounds as if you saw the comet. you saw something quite rare as i understood it. Nice piece of luck for you.

Thanks , Annette

 

[luckystar112]

Apparently the comet erupted last night

Linky!!!
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/15273/1066/

But it says it was green and blue....hmmmmmm.

Also, I googled "college station comet" and I saw that some school newspaper was reporting that observers could see the comet. It was written 18 hours ago. I tried to click on the link, and was brought to the college paper website, but couldn''t find what I had read on google. ERRR.

 

[marcy]

You probably saw a Taurid meteor. That meteor shower peaked this weekend and is usually very bright and some of them can break apart.

 

[Ninama]

Here ya go....

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9710/10/texas.meteor.ap/

 

[surfgirl]

oobie, we saw that too and I dont think it was a comet or a meteorite. Mr. Surf scanned the net and found that they sent up a rocket in FL yesterday and as the earth turns, the West Coast (we saw it at 9pm in CA, which jives with your time, right?) was able to see the rocket thruster falling through the earth's atmosphere, burning up. It was really orange, and at one point it would flicker almost out, then flare up again, then it got very faint until it got so low that it probably burned out. It was VERY cool to see, wasn't it?

Here's the news link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071111/ap_on_sc/rocket_launch;_ylt=Ag7iPilzyoin7vSFjjrtrIdvieAA

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/

ETA: The comet was a different occurrence and it was very very faint on the 10th and didn't look anything like what we saw last night. The comet was really cool, but totally different looking.

 

[Sparkster]

AAARGGGHHHHHH - they''re coming for us. RUN FOR THE HILLS!

 

[marcy]

How cool to see part of a rocket burn up and re-enter the atmosphere.

 

[oobiecoo]

Thanks for the research everyone! Surfgirl, what I saw definitely sounds like it would be the rocket... but it would have been about 5pm your time so I dunno about that. Is it still possible that I saw the same thing, just a different part of it or something?

Someone in College Station tried to say they were parachuters... I''m not buying that AT ALL! The parachuters would have had to be accelerating back and forth really fast... AND on fire!