Sorry I missed this event ! Has any one checked with NASA to see if they are
up to something? What has been described here reminds me of two event which
I should have mentioned as astro memories.
The first event occurred in the early 60's (was about 12 at that time it
guess). Walking home at twilight from a lake in the country side of Northern
New Jersey my friends and I observed a burst high in the sky. The burst
expanded out radial to a rather large diameter. The color of the burst was
yellowish to milky white. Proclaiming ignorance and innocent at that time we
hypothesized at this was either an invasion of the Martians or a Nuke over
New York City. In either case we ran home for cover. The next day we read in
the newspaper that NASA was doing cloud seeding experiments which turned out
to scared the H out of many people that saw it.
The second event was a little more controlled in that I knew of the NASA sky
burst before hand. One summer while in grad school (early 80's) I was
working for my Physics professor at the school's little observatory site at
NCSU. One NASA experiment we were involved in was tracking ionization
phenomena in the upper atmosphere. During that summer NASA released two
ionizing gas clouds at morning twilight. Don't remember the gas (maybe
Argon) but the emission was a nice ruby red. My job was to use a dob mount
like device with a detector and finder scope to track ionization cloud while
my professor tracked the emission intensity on a chart recorder. There was
about a dozen sites up and down the East coast doing the same thing. Looking
at the ionizing cloud through the finder scope was somewhat like looking at
M8 in a big dob at high mag only much closer.
Nick