bright green star ?

[hemihaggis]

hi folks , last night i was out in the garden from about 9`30 till about 11 pm , i was using my meade sn10 manualy (cause my mount has a burnt out motor ) so no goto! ... i spotted a birght green star, its position around this time it was due east and quite low down, i checked stellarium ,and uranus and pluto are in this area ,but the object sparkled like a star ,whereas planets kind of shine ,i think !! ,any ideas what it could have been ? cheers from paul

[JimStan]

Poor seeing conditions can cause any kind of sky light to "sparkle", especially when viewed near the horizon. However, as you mention, planets are less lakely to do so, because their disks actually occupy enough angle in the sky so that the light reflected from their surface is more or less "averaged out". It takes very poor seeing conditions to cause this effect, but if the object is near the horizon, it would be possible.

Uranus and certainly Pluto are probably not going to be bright enough to "sparkle", as you describe, and the discription of "green" really throws a clinker in there! Anybody else have an idea?

[rfdesigner]

I've seen various colours in normal wite stars due to really horrid seeing.

But then you don't just get green, but every colour of the spectrum.

Derek

[JimStan]

Sirius is famous for this. Sparkles like a diamond when it is close to the horizon !

Actually, isn't green a rather rare color to be seen in stars, especially close to the horizon? Just as our Sun appears to become red the closer to the horizon it gets, because the atmosphere filters out and scatters the shorter wavelengths of light ( blue sky, red sunsets ! ) green light would be greatly attenuated, I would think.

Jim S

[swamp thing]

Hi Paul

Well it wasn't Pluto that's a cert. As Pluto is near Sagittarius in the south.

Also Pluto is very faint and needs considerable aperture to even see it.

Uranus is the right colour for your mystery object and is also in the right area of sky.

Regards Steve

[hemihaggis]

cheers for that steve , i was using my meade 10" scope , but i would bet money it was a star .....but it was close to where star charts say uranus is .....mmmm i will have a look tonight ,,,clear skies lol

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Can you give any idea of the magnitude? Uranus sounds right, but Neptune is also greenish blue in colour.

[Gomby007]

I'm in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. I found this post by searching "bright green star" on Google and was surprised to see that this was posted only six days ago.

Last night, taking a walk in the forest, I gazed up at the sky and saw what appeared to be an extremely bright neon-green star. It was around 1am (unfortunately I did not have a watch to confirm the time) and was shining at least a hundred times brighter than any other star. The sky was partly cloudy but it was so bright that when clouds covered it up, I could actually see it through them. After about 5-10min it started to dim until it vanished and I could not see it any more.

Has anyone else witnessed this phenomenon before? Could anyone explain to me what it was?