Spiss

The beautiful trail in the sky looked like a mysterious celestial event. Some skygazers were treated to the unexpected view of a bright sparkling glow last week, but in reality, it was urine.

The majestic trail was created when astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery dumped their waste out into space. The water dump was a scheduled task for STS-128 pilot Kevin Ford, who poured out urine and waste water stored aboard the shuttle in preparation for a landing attempt last Thursday, which weather had thwarted.

The light show was aided by an unusually large amount of water being dumped all at once - about 150 pounds. Discovery had just undocked from the International Space Station the day before, and had not been able to unload waste water during the 10-day visit. "It would have been a large quantity because we don't do water dumps while docked to the station now...That is a fairly new restriction over the last couple of flights in order to prevent potential contamination of the Kibo module."

The Kibo module? Yes, the new Japanese-built research lab on the space station that includes an external platform to expose science experiments to the space environment. Water dumps from a docked shuttle could potentially pollute the experiments. Or turn into a solid, frozen block of piss that could crash into you.

In general, spotting space water dumps from Earth is common. Waste water usually freezes upon jettison into a cloud of tiny ice droplets. Then when the sun hits, the ice sublimates directly into water vapor and disperses in space. Abe Megahed, spotted the dump from Madison, Wisconsin, and photographed the tail. "I just watched the shuttle and station flyover and was surprised to see that the shuttle was sporting a massive curved plume," he wrote. "What could it be? Something venting? An OMS burn? RCS thrusters?"

Try a massive, record breaking urine dump.