Residents of Ireland witnessed the flight of an unusually bright fireball - a "shooting star". A number of professional astronomers, using specialized automatic cameras, recorded the flight and fall of an unusual object.
Amateur astronomers believe that this could be the entry into the atmosphere of a spent stage of a launch vehicle. However, they are puzzled by the unusual direction of flight of the fireball - from east to west, while all artificial space objects fly in one direction with the direction of rotation of the Earth from west to east.
“I saw seven objects - the brightest, flying in front, was comparable in brightness to the ISS, the rest, less bright, flew after, their glow had an orange-yellow tint,” wrote amateur astronomer Leo Enright in a specialized astronomical mailing list. In his opinion, what he observed looked like a typical fall of a rocket stage. “However, the 'train' of these objects moved from east to west,” said Enright. The scientist witnessed an unusual sight in the vicinity of Dublin.
At almost the same time, Dutchman Ramon van der Hilst, who lives north of Eindhoven, observed "a bright green object flying almost horizontally from east to west." Astronomers note that in the data of the satellite tracking system of the US Strategic Command, as well as in other sources, there is no information about the possible entry into the atmosphere of any space objects.
As amateur astronomer Tony Beresford notes, the east-west movement means that this object must have a retrograde orbit with an inclination of 126 degrees. There are very few such satellites, and they are all countless.
Dubliner David Jordan said he saw something. “I was driving along a brightly lit street in the south of Dublin, heading roughly north. I saw what at first I took for fireworks. Looking closer, I saw the main car, followed by three or four smaller cars. They moved significantly slower than a typical meteorite fireball. They broke up into fragments and left dozens of smoky trails in the sky, moving from east to west,”said Jordan.