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

Today's issue status: done

• News briefs – Washington fireball, comet news & all-sky news
  panel 2 – bits & pieces
• Risk monitoring
  – NEODyS has removed 2004 KE17

Cover: A composite from Gil Jones' animation (481Kb GIF) from his confirmation observations this morning at Three Buttes Observatory in Arizona of newly discovered comet C/2004 K3 (LINEAR). A message forwarded from the Minor Planet Mailing list (MPML) alerted A/CC about this animation, and the imagery is used here with permission. North is up and east is left. See some additional details below.

Washington fireball:  An aerial event at 2:40am PDT today "with bright flashes and sharp booms" shook Washington state's Puget Sound area, according to witness reports from "along a 60-mile swath of the sound from near Tacoma to Whidbey Island and as far as 260 miles to the east." One report of an impact was a hoax, which has been told about in an Editor & Publisher report. There are multiple Associated Press wire story variations at numerous news sites, of which the best seems to be the version at the Seattle Times, time-stamped 7:49am PDT at last check.

There is at least one video of the event. Ed Majden told the MeteorObs mailing list that he had "recorded a spectacular fireball near my south east horizon" in Courtenay, British Columbia. (An old photo at the American Meteor Society shows a "Sandia Labs all-sky video camera system" atop his observatory.)

Marco Langroek, who helped with this report, says no decaying space junk was expected to enter the

more fireball coverage >>

Comet news:  MPEC 2004-L04 today announces comet C/2004 K3 (LINEAR) with perihelion preliminarily calculated for June 30th at 1.106 AU from the Sun and 1.059 AU from Earth on a parabolic retrograde path (i=112°). See the "cover" above for confirmation imagery from this morning.

All-sky news:  Jim Gamble in El Paso, Texas reports a fireball at 11:15pm MDT Tuesday caught by all-sky camera. A portion of his composite flight image here shows the meteor flying toward the northeast.

Sandia National Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico has posted a movie (426Kb) from its all-sky camera from 10:12pm MDT last night showing a bright meteor flash above the bright Moon to the southeast.

<< Washington fireball continued from panel 1

atmosphere over northwestern North America today (the Russian Progress M1-11 re-entered today over Russia).

Update #1:  KOIN-TV in Portland, Oregon reports that "A surveillance camera at the Crazy Moose Casino in Mountlake Terrace [Washington] captured the flash of light on videotape."

Update #2:  Ed Majden in British Columbia tells A/CC that, in his video, "The fireball was very near the horizon so the trail is very short with a very bright terminal flare." And, amazingly, there is this from Chris Peterson in Colorado: "We have a handful of witness reports from people who saw this event around Denver (traveling east to west), a full 1000 miles from Seattle." The Denver Museum Colorado network of all-sky cameras are located mainly at schools, and "most schools are just out and a lot of the cameras are running unattended for a few days," so it may not be known for awhile if any caught it.

Bits & pieces:  Tumbling Stone yesterday posted its issue #25, dated May 20th. It includes an article about the mysteries of asteroid rotation and another explaining why Italy's Sirente Lake is not the result of an impact afterall.

Sky & Telescope has an article from yesterday, "NASA's O'Keefe Details Hubble Plans." See more links related to this yesterday.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has a news release from yesterday about searching for Sun-like stars at an age (1-10 million years) during which their accretion disks are in the process of being cleared out.

A Boeing news release from June 1st reports that the company has been selected by NASA to study a mission to Neptune, and it has also joined two university projects for space-based telescopes that would observe in the far-infrared and submillimeter region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Risk monitoring 3 June

The Thursday Daily Orbit Update MPEC carries observation of 2004 KE17 from Tenagra II Observatory in Arizona, and today NEODyS removed its only impact solution for this object.