Delta IV Centaur Rocket Fuel Dump

Equipment: Takahashi TOA-150 (with 0.67x flattener) on a Software Bisque Paramount ME, SBIG STL-11000M astro CCD camera

Exposure: 1 second frames, binned 3x3, ~10 seconds apart

Location: Comanche Springs Astronomy Campus near Crowell, Texas. November 11, 2007, approximately 3 AM CST. Image credits: Jay Ballauer and Vance Bagwell, Three Rivers Foundation.

There is an old saying, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Well, I do not know how prepared Vance Bagwell and I were to contemplate what we saw on one beautiful November night, but at least our equipment was ready to capture it in pictures.

Vance and I are veterans at astronomy outreach events, so when a couple of Fort Worth visitors came to us at 2:40am to ask why nobody told them about “that comet up in Orion,” we immediately rolled our eyes. However, when shown the naked eye object — both larger and brighter than the Orion Nebula — our eyes stopped rolling, and we scrambled to catch a closer view.

It wasn’t until the next day that the mystery was solved. Spaceweather.com reported that the event was a Delta IV Centaur fuel dump, which happened at an altitude of approximately 22,000 miles, following the launch of DSP 23 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.