Late last night, I noticed that the sky was clear so I took a look..
with my Yukon Ranger night vision scope. I noticed the blazingly bright planet Jupiter to the south, so I took aim..
I expected to see at least one of it’s moons and was happy see 3 of the Galileans which I found to be Callisto, Europa and Io after consulting skyandtelescope.com. The object to the lower-left of the group is an 8th-magnitude star in Libra. Ganymede is for some reason not visible but is supposed to be where the line points to.
The Ranger scope magnifies just 5x, so this is similar to viewing through binoculars as far as size of the image. These moons move real fast so by tonite they will be quite different in their arrangement.
Now for the live action...
Below is a short video with my voice-over added. Object enters from left edge.. moves quickly RIGHT across the front of Jupiter..
Of course this would only have been seen by persons in my immediate vicinity.. depending upon how far away this object was of course. The higher up it was the more people would have seen it pass close to Jupiter (along their local line-of-sight).
I attempted to work-out the metrics as best I could and have estimated that if an object that passes across the 5-degree Field-of-View of the Yukon Ranger in about one second, it is traveling at about 100mph if it is at least 1/8 Mile away.
I’ve seen many of these glowing orb things moving behind low-hanging clouds (about 1500 ft up) as well as go behind a distant building at 1/8 mile away. Also, with the lens being focused on infinity, anything closer than that 1/8 mile, especially very close objects like a passing insect, will look really big and out-of-focus as well as moving way to quickly across the viewfinder.
My numbers might be off a bit, but the concept is that apparent speed of the object increases quite a bit as distance to that object increases. Once we get to a speed estimate that is faster than any living creature, we can rule-out that as an explanation. Therefore the approximate distance is our only metric from which to build upon any useful estimate as to speed and thus size.
I guess one could argue that this was a satellite.. then I would have to reveal the few seconds of footage from BEFORE the object entered the scene. I left it out because it was so faint.. but either the same object or one much like it had just passed by Jupiter going the OTHER direction (was a bit below Jupiter). I didn’t want to confuse the issue.. so I just focussed here on the better footage of the Jupiter fly-over.
Incidentally.. as happens often.. the MOMENT i took aim at Jupiter... the first object was right there in my field-of-view. Like pretty good timing I guess.
I make no claims whatsoever as to what these objects are.
I just enjoy sharing unusual stuff that I see in the sky!