It's pretty clear it's reentry debris, just not exactly what it's from. This is a fairly regular, but very impressive-looking occurrence. I saw one once.External Quote:
Meteors are typically significantly faster than things coming from low earth orbit, in particular as the latter burn up after a period of retardation, so will be slower than usual LEO objects (7.8km/s). Meteors can be between 2 and 10 times that, so they hit the atmosphere way harder. As you mention, foreshortening, in particular with their intrinsic brightness so you see them from a greater distance and at a shallower angle, can easily fool the eye.
I tried to match it with Sitrec, but the decaying satellite rocket body CZ-2C (28222) was not observable from the camera site. However, the orbit may have degraded rapidly since the last TLE available from SpaceTrack, thus changing where it finally re-entered.
My best estimate was that the Peekskill meteor and its associated trailing pieces spanned about 30° of arc, and took about 8 seconds to traverse that space ...but that was admittedly a long time ago, so estimates are probably worthless. I'm in northeastern Ohio, and my thought was that it would impact in Lake Erie, but I was obviously way off in that guess as well! I knew it was more distant and faster than it first appeared, because a slower, closer object would have had a decaying trajectory, but this was exceptionally straight.
After spending time with Claude discussing this, we agreed that the object seen in all these videos was CZ-2C R/B(2). While I knew the final orbits of a re-entering satellite would "mess up" the TLE, I didn't know how badly the SGP4 model breaks down so rapidly in the final hours; Claude pointed out that the aerospace.org (et al.) models don't use standard orbital models for decay prediction.
