Last Night

And not a cloud in the sky.

Dinosaur head?

My wife saw it and got me to go outside and look. She said that when she first saw it, it was more compact and there were two bright dots descending from it, The dots disappeared.

It was obviously an explosion, but of what? My first remark was, "I wonder if they're doing anything at Vandenberg."

Sure enough, what we saw was the first stage separation of a Space-X missile, launched from Vandenberg. Or as Elon Musk tweeted, " "Nuclear alien UFO from North Korea,"

Some pics.

Startled a lot of people, apparently. I watched the first part of the live webcast.

Fun fact: Brazil used to generate a lot of UFO reports, mysterious things seen by lots of people. Eventually, somebody figured out that they were on the flight path for a lot of Russian rocket launches. Depending on the time of day etc, you could see big bright things even when it was quite dark on the ground, a similar situation as the SpaceX launch. Being further away from the actual launch site, the Brazilians were seeing things that were much higher and less easy to recognize. And of course the Russians didn't publicize when they were going to launch something.

We had no idea there was going to be a launch, so it was kind of an odd thing to see in the sky.

I don't know how many hundred of missiles have been launched from Vandenberg, but I think this is the first one I have ever noticed. And it's only a bout fifty miles from here.

Found a web site that says there have been more than 700 launches and 1,100 ballistic launches. Don't know why the differentiation.

_Howard wrote:

Don't know why the differentiation.

Usually there's wildfire smoke.