"Giant UFO Over Ekaterinberg, Russia -- October 10""

Dozens of photos of the apparition were made aboard ISS, I've seen them, and am trying to get them released. It's still a missile, but more interesting than ever. Please be patient.

This tweet by Luca answers a lot of my questions:



Every picture tells a story // Posted on October 17, 2013 by raffaella
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An unexpected surprise
One of the several tasks of an astronaut on the ISS is known by the acronym CEO or Crew Earth Observation. A team of researchers on ground studies the orbits of the Station and selects objectives to photograph, indicating the time of their passage, the coordinates, the type of photo you need to provide and as much information as possible to find the target. These range from easily identifiable cities to impact craters that are absolutely indistinguishable from the background – all at roughly 400km distance from us. This task is voluntary, but the challenge of finding the targets is a pleasure. Finding a particularly difficult target gives me a satisfaction that must be similar to a passionate collector purchasing a missing piece to a collection. My crew has a daily routine and Expedition 36 has far exceeded all previous photo targets snapped and sent to Earth.
I am in Cupola again and I am setting-up a camera on a window overlooking the north. The Station is operating under working hours so all the lights are on. My next Crew Earth Observation target is the Aurora Borealis. To avoid reflections from the Station’s lights I build a tent to obscure the area around the camera. I have already entered all required parameters in the camera, including the estimated time of the aurora. With a little luck I should be able to photograph the sequence even without being physically present behind the camera: at that moment I will be engaged in another activity.
Sunset is fast approaching. The gold and orange light that reflects off the solar panels attract my attention and I cannot look away until my eyes focus on an image that is foreign to nature: smoke emerges straight and clear on the horizon, accentuated by the last rays of the Sun. Nature does not like straight lines, and this inconsistency has guided my vision. I am looking at a launch of something, I do not know what and I do not know where, but it is definitely a launch. I do not know what my chances are of seeing the launch of a suborbital object when I did not know the launch details beforehand but instinctively I would say they are very slim: an extraordinary case of being in the right place at the right time!
Karen and Mike are above me in Node3, and I dare to look away for a moment to call them. They both float into the Cupola and we share the little space to observe the object as it follows its path through the upper layers of the atmosphere. Its trail is now at the mercy of the stratospheric winds which distort the shape, transforming it into a series of segments that twist, starting from the ground till it reaches the blackness of the stellar vacuum. I take one of the cameras and hope that the automatic settings will be enough to take good pictures, despite the light from the sunset starting to fade. I stop shooting only when the Sun is completely gone, but I do not stop looking. The object disintegrates before our eyes, and hundreds, probably thousands of kilometres away, we see a cloud of transparent white gas expand growing ghost-like, in all directions until it flattens when it meets the atmosphere. We wonder what we just witnessed, but even Houston ground control fails to explain.
In the evening, we discover that it was the test launch of a Russian intercontinental missile launched from Kazakhstan. All three of us are surprised by the incredible coincidence that allowed us to observe such a rare event. We are not sure what to think. For my part, I am pleased to add another valuable piece to the only true collection I have, the only one that is worth anything: my memories.