Okay, I wandered out a few minutes ago to check out the in-progress lunar eclipse. In my peripheral vision, I saw this traveling light moving up the sky toward me from the south. It was orange, flickering, and moving like an airplane and about as fast, a bit larger than a star appears. After about fifteen seconds, it started to dim and suddenly disappeared. Not obscured, but gone. What airplanes fly with orange lights? I took a picture of it, but it's not very helpful: just an orange dot squiggled out by camera shake.

Any ideas? Satellite? Meteorite?

Satellite probably, entering the shadow of the earth, maybe.

Where were you, what time? www.heavens-above.com can identify satellites for you, and tell you when they'll appear (and disappear!)

Welcome to BAUT.

20:02 my time (GMT-8, Washington State) according to my camera's internal clock (which is fairly accurate). Doesn't look like there should have been any satellites going over at all:

http://www.heavens-above.com/allsats...d&alt=0&tz=PST

Post the photo anyway.

I'll post it once I get to a working cardreader... mine has been refusing to read my perfectly fine SD card.

I've checked out the satellites expected to pass overhead, none of them seem to match:
http://www.heavens-above.com/allsats...666667&Mag=4.5

What I saw came straight north along the western side of Orion at 20:02 Pacific time (according to my camera's internal clock). None of those satellites should have been visible at that time anyway.

Not all the orbiting objects find there way onto 'heavens-above's' site. I would think you saw, as stated a satellite entering Earths shadow. It happens a lot. Or just as a aircraft with its landing lights being switched off, maybe. There is always an explanation. Knowing which is the problem.

Still could have been an airplane, particularly if you saw it in the West, as the sun continues to illuminate higher altitudes long after sunset.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

Yes, I've worked on and around airplanes all my life, and they can be difficult to recognize under some conditions. I stood on the front porch of my house and watched a small plane with its landing lights on fly directly toward me at low altitude, and the glare from the lights was so bad that it could not be identified visually until it was overhead, and there was no sound from the engines until it had passed overhead.

Oops, I'm an idiot, it was at 7:00, not 8. My camera's an hour off. It could have been this satellite:
http://www.heavens-above.com/PassDet...499.1222311917
Followed the same path that I saw very closely. Do satellites often appear yellow?

I also saw a moving light about that time (also from Washington State) which I took to be a satellite. It was a bit different from other satellites I've seen in that it was very bright when I first saw it, so I thought it was a planet. Then it dimmed and as I realized it was moving it disappeared.

But now that I think about it, the one I saw moved from North to South so it wasn't the same. I suspect a lot of people may have seen things in the sky they aren't used to just because they don't usually look at the sky.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

I thought about suggesting that your camera may still be on daylight saving time, but none of the satellites seemed to fit anyway--that one doesn't disappear. Although, it could have hit a non-visible cloud bank or somethingsure, because the reflected sun is yellow Don't hit me George

Now, go out and find some more satellites tonight, and tell us what they look like!

Several years ago, I saw the ISS & Shuttle from the Arizona desert just after sunset. The reflected light did look yellowish. Although I typically think the smaller satellites look redish.

You might have also seen the meteorite that flashed over the Pacific Northwest or the reentry of the satellite we recently shot down. Both happened recently.

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Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
- Goethe

Jump in with both feet!
- Me, indulging my inner eight-year-old

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"Are you a mad-hatter that just types what he wishes, or have you actually any physics training?"
Occam's Ghost to Grant Hutchison.