What did I see????

[sydney_vt]

Got home tonight and was looking at the stars before going inside and I saw at first what I though to be a satalite judging by its size and movement but then it just vanished. Not knowing a good deal about things could that have been just a shooting star? I have seen satalites before and this was just like it. Im used to shooting stars darting across the sky in the blink of an eye, not moving so slowly. I didn't think planes or satalite turn their lights off. Any ideas anyone?? Im in Dundas Valley nsw and was looking pretty much to the SLP, maybe a little above. Help me out people or ill convince myself I saw a..................


.:ship1:

[[1ponders]]

More than likely a satellite. It is quite common for satellites to disappear as they move into the earths shadow. The International space station and the Hubble space telescope do it all the time.

[Jarrod]

hi,

I'd say what you saw was a satellite moving into the earth's shadow.

Satellites don't have lights, what makes a satellite visible to us is sunlight reflecting of it. therefore they are only visible when exposed to direct sunlight, and will "disappear" when they move behind our shadow.

Jarrod.

EDIT: damn, [1ponders] bet me to it. :P

[[1ponders]]

:lol: ya gotta be quick around here somedays :P

[sydney_vt]

well thats a little disapointing. Im going to stick with my first thought..

[programmer]

How fast did it move across the sky and roughly how much sky did it travel across (i.e. arc).

I saw 8 'shooting stars' last night in a short viewing session, 3 through eyepiece and 5 unaided, and 2 of them I'm not sure what they were. 6 of the 8 were brief pinprick sized flashes that, to me, appear as a short 'line' on my retina. To me that's a 'typical' brief meteor. These 2 were much longer lived and didn't leave that 'streak' imprint on my retina. The first travelled at least 45 degrees of arc across the sky from west towards north before disappearing into nearby skyglow, more slowly than most meteors but much faster than a plane (and it didn't flash) or satellite. It also appeared to have some 'shape' rather than be a pinprick. Then a bit later I saw the same thing, different part of the sky, same description as above but travelled even further across the sky than the first time, roughly southeast to southwest. Let the UFO consipracies continue :eyepop:

[tornado33]

You may have seen an Irridum flare
http://satobs.org/iridium.html
Go here to input your location and get flare predictions
http://www.heavens-above.com/
Scott

[programmer]

Interesting.. had a quick look but none seem to fit. If you have links to some video footage or images, I could compare what I saw. I'll also have a search. Thanks!

[Blue Skies]

Satellites don't have lights. Or internal lights of any kind. They don't need them. The only light that is involved with them is reflected light from the sun. Which is why they seem to disappear when they move into the Earth's shadow.

As a presenter at the local planetarium I get to see a lot of school kids and I've been made aware that children sometimes think that the Earth has an internal glow, they don't realise that we only see the planets and the moon because of they reflect sunlight. While I could probably run through quite a few misconceptions people have about space stuff the other interesting one I've come across recently is kids thinking that Earth is another planet out there in the solar system. They haven't quite got to grips that we are standing on it yet!

[Astro78]

After being fortunate enough to see two incredible fireballs in the past (1st) 6 months, I noticed around a similar time to you a very slow moving object that I thought was about to enter the atmosphere and explode.

After a few hours research it seemed most likely to be Seasat1 (if i remember correctly).

Check out - http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/JavaSSOP.html - somewhere in there you can set your location and it will tell you what time, from where and how long the satellite will be visable. Some for around 4-5 minutes!