METEORS FROM HALLEY'S COMET: Set your alarm for 4 a.m. On Thursday morning, Oct. 22nd, meteors from Hallery's comet will fly across the predawn sky. Early risers can see 10 to 20 Orionid meteors/hour alongside Mars and Jupiter, which are converging in the east. [sky map] [meteor alerts]
SPACE WARFARE VISIBLE IN BACKYARD TELESCOPES: On Monday, we asked the question "Can you see space warfare in your own eyepiece?" On Tuesday, we learned the answer: "Yes." Using 14-inch optics, a Swiss company named "s2a systems" has successfully recorded a military encounter in low-Earth orbit.
This Oct 18th movie shows Russia's Cosmos 2612 just after it flew extremely close to ICEYE-X36, a surveillance satellite supplying images to Ukraine:
ICEYE-X36 is the brighter of the two dots. It belongs to a Finnish-American company, and uses synthetic aperture radar to form intelligence-grade images of the Earth below. Cosmos 2612 is the dimmer object. We know only that it is a Russian military satellite. Its mission has never been announced and its specs have never been published.
On Oct. 18th, Cosmos 2612 approached ICEYE-X36 within a few hundred meters. s2a systems caught them a few hours later when the distance had increased to 4.9 km.
Satellite analyst Jonathan McDowell, recently retired from Harvard, said: “To my knowledge, this is the first LEO (low Earth orbit) rendezvous of two active satellites."
Only Russia knows what Cosmos 2612 was doing. It may have been a harmless inspection--or a dry run for something else. In 2020, another Russian satellite, Cosmos 2543, released a high-speed object that looked a lot like an anti-satellite weapon.
"[The two satellites] are currently 480 km apart, but Cosmos 2612 is still maneuvering," reports Marco Langbroek, Lecturer in optical Space Situational Awareness at Delft University of Technology. "This might suggest it is not done with ICEYE-X36 yet."
Amateur astronomers can monitor developments. ICEYE-X36 shines like a 7th-magnitude star, while its Russian stalker is ~4 magnitudes dimmer. Right now, the two satellites are making a series of pre-dawn passes over South America, Australia and New Zealand. If you see them, submit your images here.
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CAMPO DEL CIELO METEORITE PENDANT: This meteorite came from space. We sent it back again. The students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched it to the stratosphere onboard a cosmic ray research balloon, more than 109,620 feet above the Sierra Nevada near Bishop, CA:
You can have it for $299.95. Encased in a sterling silver cage, this is a genuine iron-nickel Campo del Cielo meteorite from Argentina. It landed on Earth 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, and made the return trip on Aug. 1, 2026. This pendant comes with a Certificate of Authenticity and a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight.
The students are selling space pendants to pay the helium bill for their cosmic ray ballooning program. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight and telling the story of its trip to the stratosphere and back again.
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