About a month ago, I was outside with my telescope around 2:30am when at my zenith and a little west I saw a light that was perfectly round. It was white and grew to about a third of the size of a full moon then shrunk back down and headed SSW until it got too dim to see with the naked eye. It wasn't moving until it shrunk back down to the "size" of a star.

I went to sky & telescope's webpage to see if the ISS was flying over my area at that time but it wasn't. But I am thinking it is some kind of satellite, although I've never seen one like that before or since. Anyone know what it was?

Probably an Iridium flare. If you had date and time info, you might be able to use your lat/lon position to go back and see if any were visible using Heavens Above, the German Space Operations utility.

I was going to say it might be a light from a plane. If it was heading straight towards you it would appear very bright and wouldn't appear to be moving, then would become dimmer and appear to move off in another direction when the plane banked away from your line of sight. But since you said it was near the zenith it seems unlikely to have been a plane.

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Forgive this thought if it is not applicable, but I just have to ask, Have you used your telescope for very long? Things out of focus get real big, and planets move out of your telescope's field rather quickly.

Was it through your scope or not?

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Here are some ISS pictures. It doesn't look very round.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...spaceship2.htm

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Here's a link of satellite animations on the page you posted:
http://www.analemma.de/english/ccdsatel.html

The one of the Mir station looks an awful lot like what I saw, but obviously it couldn't have been that.

The animation of the ISS isn't round enough and I don't think it was in my area at the time. But thanks to your link, I have no doubts now that it was a satellite of some kind.

Thanks,
CzC

http://www.heavens-above.com/iridium...ecified&TZ=CET


That look close? GoW is probably right, it sounds like an Iridium flare.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: RalphVanDyke on 2002-08-01 10:25 ]</font>

Yea, RIP MIR. You're referring to this image, right? That is a flare, and that is pretty much what happens with the Iridium satellites--and they do get very bright, up to mag. -9, in some cases.

Do you have a date and time?

That's very UFO like. So what is an irridium flare? The satellite booster rocket for repositioning or something?

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[quote]
On 2002-08-02 18:30, beskeptical wrote:
No. It is the sun glinting off an iridium satellite (one of the 60+ that were orbited for the global communication project that went bankrupt and then was bought out by someone). They are highly reflective, and when you are in line with one they can be so bright that you can even see them in daylight (they sometimes appear brighter than venus, although not always since you have to be in the right alignment for them to appear that bright). The web site (heavens-above) referenced earlier in the thread has predictions for any location.

Much brighter than Venus, even. Venus is usually down (1) around -4, whereas some of the Iridium flares get up to -9. 5 magnitudes, hey, that's 100 times brighter. That's an amount of light as bright as a crescent moon, concentrated in one little dot.

Do iridium flares stay still for a few seconds then start moving? If so, then I'd say it was an ir flare.

CzC

It was with the naked eye.

CzC

While it is bright, you probably won't notice much motion. After it dims, you can sometimes still see them, as a satellite. So, yeah, it might have been what you saw.

Go to the Heaven's Above site, and find another very bright one (mag. 8 or above) in your vicinity, and check it out.

Wow. Think about it. It's like signaling with a mirror. Doesn't hit a very big target. You are within a tiny arc where that itty bitty satellite is just reflecting for a few seconds the light from the Sun to the very spot you are on. And some people have calculated that itty bitty spot then lined up their camera to catch the thing at just the right moment. That sould be on one of those 'That's Incredible' shows. It sure seems more incredible to me than eating worms. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

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Here's another picture of an iridium flair. Pretty cool!

http://epod.usra.edu/archive/epodviewer.php3?oid=104192

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Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture? We can see the gradiation of the dark sky near the photograher's zenith to lighter sky closer to the horizon. Which looks like either a setting sun which has just gone down or a rising sun about to come up. But yet in the foreground we see what looks like trees illuminated by the sun behind the photographer.

Of course I could be wrong, it wouldn't be the first time and it sure ain't gonna be the last.

CzC

Hate to throw cold water on what appears to be a reasonable explanation but, the OP said that the object was near zenith at 2:30 AM.

Iridium satelites are in low Earth orbits. I seriously doubt that the Sun's rays reach them when they are nearly overhead at that time of night. Iridium flares are usually seen near sunrise or sunset, when the satelite is in sunlight and the observer is in darkness.
Of course, CzC doesn't give his location and there are places where 2:30 is near dawn in the summertime (far northern latitudes).

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T. Anderson

Hi!

About that last photo: a 40 second exposure at f/3.5 cannot be taken when the sun is up (at least not if you still want to see something). So it can't be the sun illuminating those trees. I'd say it's either the moon, or artificial lights (streetlights, home illumination, etc.).

Also, it is very well possible to see an iridium flare at 2:30. Here at 50° North latitude, it doesn't really get dark at all in summer (maybe 2 minutes or so between the end of astronomical twilight in the evening and start of astronomical twilight in the morning [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]. Even now we can still see satellites in LEO all night, even though we have a few hours of darkness again. Remember that near the equinoxes, the sun sets and rises at a very shallow angle, and in the summer that means it doesn't dip very far beneath the horizon, making it very well possible to see Iridium flares in the middle of the night.

BTW, I took those Mir and ISS shots - that's the way it looks in a telescope, and only if you're tracking very smoothly by hand or are using a computer drive.

Regards,
Ulrich

If it helps, I'm at 38.5 N. I was going to post my lat. but since I can't recall which day, I thought it pointless. It was within a day or two of the first day of summer.

The time I'm not too sure of (I do know it was well before 3am) and the sky was very dark one of the best 'seeing' nights since I got my scope.

CzC

CzC, given the time of your observation, its location in the sky, and its unusual movement, I think we can safely conclude you saw an alien spaceship with techonolgies far beyond our own.

I happen to know these particular aliens came from the Andromeda Galaxy. They are also green and like to wear furry little hats.

[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

I'm not familiar enough with night sky fotography to know if the background is off. Seattle sunsets look like this all the time except it wouldn't be dark enough for the stars to be showing. Often as the Sun sets the light hits buildings or trees and makes a really beautiful sight. It is especially nice when the light reflects a lot of yellow and there are dark grey skies behind the lighted objects. That would seem to be the correct place for the Sun to be to reflect back off the satellite toward the camera.

But the exposure to get the background stars and not over expose the foreground, hmmmm. Perhaps the light on the trees has another source. And the horizon being lighter could certainly be city lights.

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For the record, that's Beskeptigal.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: beskeptical on 2002-08-05 03:50 ]</font>