Your strangest astro observation ..

[Pete_inthehills]

About 8 years ago, we'd just bought our house up here in the wilds of Aberdeenshire. We're blessed with very dark skys. You can see a street light, but you need binoculars to do so.

Anyway, I was out looking for the aurora and there was a bright green object appeared low in the west and tracked across and down. It was almost like someone had let off a flare. I've seen it once since then. I wonder if its a meteor with a chemical composition that makes it burn green.

pete

inthehills

[george7378]

For me, it would have to be four satellites flying fast in formation, followed by two more which were regularly pulsing before they faded into the shadow.

[PortableAstronomer]

For me it was the total solar eclipse on 11-Aug-1999 in France ; for me it was amazing to get clear sky, but the guys that came with me were saying "pfff, was that all the fuss was about?" That anticlimax-like response was my strangest asronomical experience.

[Ender Of Days]

A friend was showing me a picture he'd taken a few nights ago of the Moon,it shows a dark "ribbon" covering across the Moon

at first I thought it was a hair or something but he says there were a a few of them "light thin smoke trails" but "like a ribbon swirling around",

He only managed to get the one picture and says he saw several others floating across the Moon through the camera before he got the last one (Camera/lens issue ?)

I asked if it could be migrating birds but the image doesn't show any individual objects just a smokey trail,

He says he'll come up and I can put the pic up sometime soon,

JJ..

[philwright66]

here is one of mine.the object appeared low in the west about 5 minutes before the ISS was due to pass over.i was waiting to image the space station with my celestron 5 + canon 550d - handheld.object looked like a faint star to the naked eye,and was rising slowly.i thought 'lantern' but took a few images anyway. object stopped moving after a minute or two and was stationary.took my eyes off it to look for the ISS rising in the southwest.the way it is illuminated does not correspond with any lantern i have ever seen on video or tv.

cheers,phil

[philwright66]

ps.all the specks in the image are just noise artifacts.

cheers.

[philwright66]

here is the first image,taken 1 second earlier.as can be seen, the object is rapidly changing shape in some way.

cheers.

[Orion_the_Hunter]

@Manock, I was looking at Sirius the other night and it did that, but it looked like there was two of them really close together!

[jwallis]

Ender of days. A friend of mine who i pursueded to go out and take a few snaps of the moon the other night,when it was full, contacted me the following day and asked if i had seen a black line going across it. Unfortunatly i did not, but it seems that it was not a fault in any equipment. Be good to see the pic.

[umadog]

I think sprites happen on a very fast time scale, but they are awesome nonetheless:

sprite atmospheric - Google Search

Upper-atmospheric lightning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I was in my backyard a couple of months ago trying to track down NGC 7662. I was using a low power so my FOV was about 1.5 degrees. Suddenly an airliner crossed the field of view, filling it momentarily. I was really quite surprising and scared the cr@p out of me. I couldn't hear it since it was probably quite high up, but it was illuminated and so very salient.

[Ender Of Days]

Here's the photo of the moon my mate took

This was the last of 3 "things" he saw float across the moon

Taken 17,1,11 2.21am

1/350 f5.6 on his Fugipix bridge camera.

He swears it wasn't taken through a window and there was no trees in the way,

Any idea's ?

JJ..

[reddoss]

These ribbons across the moon look like high level aircraft con trails to me.

[Keiran]

About 6 weeks ago, I was unpacking my car, and happened to look up... It was about 10pm, and a very crisp, dark night.

I noticed this thing moving over head, it was completly silent and seemed to be pulsing on and off ( and blue/red colour). The lights were in a striaght line horizontal, and very thin...

I watched it move from south to north, and then suddenly turn west. It turned so quickly, it was almost impossible that it was a plane. It then turned back towards my direction and then completly disappeared, about 10 seconds later the lights appeared again!

I grabbed my binos quick, but i couldnt work out what it was... It finally came closer, and i managed to make out its shape.

It was a Microlite.... The bloke must have been suicidal, it had to have been -3*c on the ground, so who knows how cold up there!

[tibbs1972]

Here's something slightly strange.

The last 2 night's, I looked straight up over Rutland, when I got home and out of my car.

I usually do this when the stars are out and stargaze for a few minutes before I go inside. Normally I see a plane or a satellite pass over.

The strange thing I saw the last 2 nights was a bright white light flash towards me. This was much brighter than any of the stars, and brighter than a double star blinking. I seemed to grow to about 5 times the size of the largest star, like a pulse of light and then vanish.

Maybe it was my eyes playing tricks, it's never happened before, but I'm spending at least 5 times as much as usual stargazing lately since I bought my scope, so logically I am going to see more things happening. I'm sure it wasn't a shooting star either as I'm used to seeing them, they look totally different to this observation.

[cathalferris]

There's nothing quite like having a plane on approach fill your eyepiece with its landing lights on and you get to see all the navigation lights as well, when it's about 2 miles out and the sound hasn't arrived yet..

Strangest things I've seen? I've seen a sprite from a thundercloud, about 25 miles away one late summer's evening. I saw the cloud flash and a very short time later (1/10 sec) I saw the plume of pinkish grey above the cloud. Very memorable, even if I did know what it was when I saw it.

It's funny, in ~25 years of lookign up and spending a lot of time being aware of the sky I have yet to see something that I can't explain, but I haven't seen the likes of a rocket trail or a fuel venting yet.

[nightvision]

Here's something slightly strange.

The last 2 night's, I looked straight up over Rutland, when I got home and out of my car.

I usually do this when the stars are out and stargaze for a few minutes before I go inside. Normally I see a plane or a satellite pass over.

The strange thing I saw the last 2 nights was a bright white light flash towards me. This was much brighter than any of the stars, and brighter than a double star blinking. I seemed to grow to about 5 times the size of the largest star, like a pulse of light and then vanish.

Maybe it was my eyes playing tricks, it's never happened before, but I'm spending at least 5 times as much as usual stargazing lately since I bought my scope, so logically I am going to see more things happening. I'm sure it wasn't a shooting star either as I'm used to seeing them, they look totally different to this observation.

Hi Tibbs, I have seen that exact type of event. I was in Brittany staying at a golf course hotel on top of a small mountain in a rural area. Got back late one night to see the best (and darkest) sky of my life (no bins!). Staring at the milky-way and explaining stuff to my non-astro friend we both watched something appear, very bright like a beam high up that grew in length and then vanished. It was like nothing I had ever seen in decades of skywatching (and I have seen 2 huge fireballs and plenty of other interesting stuff), he asked me to explain, I have to admit I was initially a little bewildered. Then I remembered the Iridium-flare sats I read about some years earlier. These appear at up to mag -9.5 so are very bright. Here is the wiki article: Satellite flare - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The flare simulation on the wiki site doesn't do the experience justice!

Tony.

[tibbs1972]

Interesting artical Tony, it's as good an explanation as any.

[Tim]

My bet would be an Iridium flare, you can probably work out if it was given your location etc.

My strangest sighting, also seen by others here, was a very bright object moving slowly near the pole star, west to east, very slowly, and then disappearing rapidly. I think it was some kind of far orbiting satellite. Oh, a tumbling satellite we saw once was pretty cool, flashing as it went, and we saw once those three sats in triangle formation go over, very cool

[Vega]

For me, a couple things that were later explained (like most things) but at the time was convinced it was something supernatural or way out of the ordinary. Thank goodness for places like SGL where knowlegable people can give me my sanity back.

1. First Iridium Flare (and it was -6 magnitude!). Gobsmacked

2. First ever sighting of 3 Chinese Lanterns released from nearby village (I was ready to build a bunker lol!)

3. When I was about 14, saw a red light travel in a straight line from North to South in what seemed to last about 10 seconds from horizon to horizon. However now im older and wiser this could have been a low orbit satellite (maybe my judgement of time was a little suss back then!)