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Waaa what a surprise!


N3ptune

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This is it!

I saw my first --- today! until I installed the telescope to realize it was not a --- but another strange object. I spotted it with naked eye, my first weather balloon!

During the day at around 18:45 it was a fairly large star in the sky at maybe 40d from the ground so I sit on a bench outside looking at the field then I see THAT bright star.. "what is that star?" then I try to see if it could be a planet.. no, the moon (because there is an event today with the planets, could it be that? unlikely), could it be a plane? no, it's too stable to be a plane. (I live close to an airport)

Now I am getting excited, I run inside the house to find my pair of binoculars and all I see is a small oval silver shape, very bright.. WOW! Then I run downstairs to take the telescope, installed it in about 3 minutes, put the 18mm eyepiece on and PAF!

It's a big nice weather balloon! but a lovely one very nice shape with a device with 3 lights in the form of a triangle attached to it.

I took a few pictures, this was the mysterious unknown star during the day, close to the trees.

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This is about what I could see with the binoculars, a bit less, it's from the finder of course at maybe 9x

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And with the telescope 18mm eyepiece 55x now it's obvious. This is my best shot with my camera at the exit pupil.

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And another inferior shot.

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Wow that was intense, when you don't know what you see in the sky?  YESS (:   Very happy right now.

 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Dave In Vermont said:

Indeed!

I had no idea the Zeta-Reticulans are using 'weather-balloons' as advance scout-ships!

Did you go for your shotgun and try to force a landing? Must not allow any illegal-aliens entry, you know...

Dave  :p

Lol :p no I am not from Texas and I heard It's against the law to shoot at an unidentified flying object.

I wrote to Weather Canada 10 minutes ago about the balloon including my logs and pictures, to know more about the mission of this particular balloon, I hope they will feed me with information, it could be interesting.

1 hour ago, Red Dwarfer said:

I seen something vary in brightness about 10 degrees above the Pleiades tonight as well - looked like a star but went from bright to dim in 3 second intervals then stopped when I tried to get a closer look with binoculars - a weather balloon , maybe ? 

I am in Canada so it's not the same thing for sure, it's better not to speculate too much about what your saw unfortunately...

===============

I have this other picture too, it looks pretty much like my first the view in the binoculars. When I saw a stable bright orb like that in the sky (much much slower then a plane), I had an increase in heart rate. 

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Nice catch! I had never seen a pic of a weather balloon taken through an amateur stargazer's telescope. When I was a kid the local newspaper talked about people confusing weather balloons with alien spaceships, but despite the many articles over the years, the paper never showed a picture of a weather balloon, and didn't even print a written description!

This was so frustrating! Luckily now we can access these images to make up our minds about them, or even take these pics ourselves.

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