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Thursday, 14 February 2013

Was this the Russian meteor or a Satellite over Kent?

This afternoon, the sun finally came out. I stood on the garden deck and had a stretch and a break from sitting in front of my computer. I looked around the sky in the hope of seeing our local Buzzards enjoying the warmth. Looking to the east, at an angle of 45 degrees, I could see a white light source, stationary in the sky. It looked similar to and as bright as Venus or Jupiter would look against a dark sky, except this was about 2.30 in the afternoon! It looked motionless compared with airliners that were criss-crossing the sky, reinforcing the feeling that whatever I was watching, was static.

I walked back to the house and grabbed my camera and 500mm lens. I took one burst of pics before the phone started to ring inside the house - my wife! I explained I didn't want to talk because I was taking pics of a UFO!

I took the phone out to the garden and told Sian that I could still see the light, and that I needed to take more pics, but then, a cloud obscured the view - and that was that.

Look at the photos below. What looked like a bright white light to my eye, takes on a shape through the lens. I decided it might be the ISS, which I've seen and photographed many times before. I also thought that it wasn't moving - which was odd as the ISS moves quickly across the sky. But my check of the ISS timetable showed no passes over the UK at that time. I've also checked NASA's site for satellite passes and, as yet, can't find anything at that time.




About five minutes later, I took a picture of the same area of sky with a standard lens so I had some reference of the sky scape at the time. See pic below.


I then took a pic of an Easyjet plane crossing the sky east to west in the same direction as our UFO. When I looked carefully at the pics on the computer I can see a small white and out-of-focus fuzz in the image. This again reminds of a poor record shot that you might take of Jupiter or Venus, except this was before 3pm in the afternoon. Have a look at the pic (below) and at the small out of focus white dot, bottom left of the picture. The same dot is in all the pics I took of the plane - is this perhaps the same object - perhaps a balloon? Or perhaps, it's an unknown satellite. But I don't understand why I thought it was static? Any thoughts anyone?


1 comment:

Ploddingbirder said...

Hi Nick, I'm pleased to see you are still looking skyward. As to what the UFO is, the best I can come up with is, its Reg Presley going home!