Hi HN!<p>With the CZ5N re-entry happening I figured you could point me in the right direction to solve this mystery:<p>On the evening of july 14, around 20:15 UTC we saw something pass over our heads fairly slowly (apparently stationary), leaving a greenish, sparkly line over the course of several minutes. It also left a long trail that apparently was still illuminated by the sun, originating at an azimuth of ~210° (SSW).<p>Our observation position was ~48.08° N, 11.28° E (southern Germany, near Munich).<p>About 20 minutes later I tried digging into it a little on James Darpinian's See A Satellite Tonight and found a rocket/booster stage that could have had a matching trajectory (CZ-4B R/B).<p>I'd love to dig deeper into this, so:<p>1. Are there any websites where I can revisit that time/location? I'm aware of TLEs but would appreciate a "time-travel" view for the location in question<p>2. The CZ-4B R/B still seems to be „around“. Is it likely that we saw re-entry of only smaller parts of it that were just low enough to "hit" a substantial amount of atmosphere?<p>3. Are there other explanations for a slow-moving object leaving a trail creating greenish, sparkly lines?<p>4. What additional information would be needed to figure out what happened?<p>Any help is much appreciated!
Five days earlier a 10-foot piece of space debris crashed in Australia - the largest one since SkyLab.<p><a href="https://www.newsweek.com/huge-piece-space-rocket-falls-sky-lands-sheep-farm-1729111" rel="nofollow">https://www.newsweek.com/huge-piece-space-rocket-falls-sky-l...</a><p>It's probably unrelated -- but there's the possibility that an even larger object had split into two chunks, with one hitting Australia and the other taking an additional five days before its orbit decayed.
I would also suggest posting to Reddit's <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/</a> where these types of questions aren't uncommon.
CZ-5B re-entered over the Indian Ocean about 8 hours ago (10:45am MDT). [<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-booster-rocket-debris-could-hit-earth-saturday/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-booster-rocket-debris-c...</a>]