Could I have seen two satelites last night?

[omegaman]

Hello all,

I went out last night with my HD 7x50 bino's and at approx. 12.45am early Monday, I saw through my bino's, a small white dot whizzing very fast near the area of VEGA. It was slightly sloped downwards whizzing from a north to east direction.

And after that, I saw a smaller dot of white whizzing the opposite direction, near VEGA, but sloped upwards.

Could these be satelites, guys?

Thanks in advance.

Its the first time that I've seen these.

Jeff

[jgs001]

Jeff, it sounds probable. There's a lot of satellites up there in close orbit. Some nights, I've seen more satellites than anything else or at least it seems like it ... sign up to heavens-above and enter your location, as long as you have the times you saw them, you'll be able to identify what you saw.

[Breakintheclouds]

Yes, it sounds like satellites. I reckon on a typical night's observing I'll see at least one or two through the eyepiece.

[Capricorn]

The answer is going to be: Just 2?

There is quite a few of the things wandering round up there, if you find a reasonable site and just look round over a period of an hour you should see a fair few, and you will have missed some.

[Earl]

Its quiet amazing my much stuff goes on up there when you get out to a Dark Site.

My Brother in law has a cottage in the Hereford county side and its very Dark, with no street lighting.

When I looked up to the skies for the first time there I was in awe of the beauty of it all.

Then watching it for a while, theres sats buzzing over, lots of shooting stars amazing.

Edison has a lot to answer for LOL

[BazMark]

One night not too long back I had my scope trained on Saturn for about an hour. During that hour I saw at least four satellites 'fly by' Saturn. I believe my scope has about a 1 degree FOV, probably a lot less at the mag I was at so I was amazed to see so many fly accross my FOV in such a short time. There must be tons of stuff up there.

[thesatanbug]

Satellites or even apogee stages from space launchers.

It has long been predicted that we will be trapped or entombed here on Earth by space junk or debris from exponentially increasing collisions from all this close earth activity.

[Digz]

There's a cool plug-in for Google Earth which shows you all the satellites orbiting the Earth. I nearly fell off my chair when I zoomed out and saw them all. It was like a cloud around the Earth with a combination of close orbiting satellites and some really deep orbiters. Worth a look to get a sense of perspective.