Unusual Sighting 16 Oct

Hi All,

When doing a few binocular variables in the pre-dawn skies of last Wednesday morning I saw an interesting and peculiar object.

While locating the field of W Ori at about 0550 GMAT (1750hrs 16 Oct UT) I noticed what appeared to be a small comet-like object through the 10x50mm binoculars. I then quickly brought the 20x80mm outdoors to better view this object, noticing that is was clearly moving quite quickly relative to the background stars towards the north east. It travelled from near eta Ori past Alpha Ori in about 1 minute after which I stopped following it.

The object looked stellar in appearance, just like a satellite of about magnitude 7, but had a distinct circular cloud of white coma-like material extending about 10 arcmin to the east, the star being located at the western edge of the cloud.

Most peculiar! I have no idea what it was but suspect it to be a spent rocket booster with plume of propellent.

Just a brief distraction from the job at hand.

Tks and regards

Peter Williams

Hi Peter,

What was the approx R.A. & DEC of this mysterious object? Did you see it the next night? which would be pretty hard considering the random weather we are having the odd flying branch that came down today.

Sounds like a rocket booster of some kind, remember the one posted on the net that appeared in the northern hemisphere it created a spiral struture in the night sky, pretty impressive.

Hi Matt, There was no time to do accurate RA/Dec positions as the object was moving too quickly and because of this rapid motion there was no point in checking the following morning (when bed was so warm and comfortable).

Tks.

Peter Williams