I heard news today that an unknown comet has been spotted in the western skies over Beijing. It is reported to be shining at an apparent mag 0.

This report hasn't been confirmed as of yet, but I'm waiting for confirmation now.

A magnitude ZERO? Man. now that would be cool. I better start checking my comet lists!

Wow.  Could it be Holmes once again?

L

Any additional info on location that's more specific than "western skies over Beijing"? If it's a comet, it will be in the western skies over any place at similar latitudes tonight, but that's still a lot of territory to cover ...

I haven't found anything in searching the usual news links like MPC and I no longer subscribe to the bulletins.

It's been mostly cloudy here in Dallas all day, but it's clearing now, so I may get a chance to look for it.

??

JB

 Here's the latest information I got from Huan Meng of the Beijing Planetarium.

Huan Meng:

Some details and follow-ups on this object:

Yiran Wu (39.979deg N, 116.299deg E, northwest suburb of Beijing)
found the object in Aries by naked-eye and immediately reported to me
at 11:21 UT (hereafter). Her estimation of total magnitude is
about -2 ("somewhat bighter than Sirius").
I myself (39.883deg N, 116.617deg E) saw the object with a 12x60
binocular. The object had a typical cometary apperance with a
slightly curved tail towards SE-E, at 11:24. Core magnitude was about
+0.5, total magnitude about -1.5.
Hongbin Li at Xinglong Station, NAOC (40.396deg N, 117.578deg E,
mountain top; MPC code: 327) asked me via internet if there is a very
bright comet in the western sky at 11:34. But he said that he found
that object about 20min earlier.
The 0.8-m Tsinghua-NAOC telescope had pointed in turn to 179P and
150P since 11:40, but found it was neither of them.
Yiran Wu reported the object, especially the core, was rapidly
fading, at 11:43. And could no longer found it since ~11:59. Hongbin
Li also found the object was expanding, decaying and slowly moving
toward the north, and finally disappeared to naked-eye at 12:14, near
382 Per.

Indeed it seems to be the fuel dump as you supposed.. My apologies
for the false alert.

Kind regards,
Huan
 

So it was caused by the fuel dump of the third stage rocket following the launch of NROL-28 from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 10:01 UT this morning. Doesn't that sound familiar?

Rats!

L

My thoughts exactly.  

That's getting to be a habit, isn't it?

Something that bright did seem to good to be true. I was checking every comet survey group I knew of and kept drawing blanks. 

Since China (cough) invented astronomy, you'd think they could tell 'gasoline' from gas.