I saw the WEIRDEST thing in tonght's sky...

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid

My only other guess is that it was a dwarf novae, but those generally have longer durations of brightness.

I didn't report it to anyone. I figured why bother, since I have no idea what it is I'm seeing.

Thats my guess too; a phenomena similar to a small novae
Im surprised no other astronomers noticed it also; but perhaps they did and they are just gathering their paperwork and evidence before they go public with it....maybe we should wait a few days 2 check it out.

You said you didnt report it to anyone; but actually you did
Us here at ATS hehe

But i know what you mean tho; you didnt report it to any "official channels"

sorry 2 nitpick your words so much today hehe


its just my wife is constantly correcting my useage of english language and she gets really mad if i misspell a word *i dont care about spelling so much being no one heres giving me a degree for correct spelling but anyways

she picks on me constantly about it so if im held responsible for every little pointless error you will be too lol
dont take it serious cuz i dont
i take it light heartedly

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid
For the third time, it was a stationary point source.

what I was going by was the picture attached to my article
see here

to me that wasn't a streak across the sky -- I thought that perhaps you saw something like that.

Originally posted by justme1640
to me that wasn't a streak across the sky -- I thought that perhaps you saw something like that.

If you look carefully you can see some of it extended below that layer of clouds. Also, it was fairly high in the sky (30 degrees up), and just a point source. It was definitely extra-solar.

[edit on 11/3/2005 by cmdrkeenkid]

might want to find out what kind of low magnatue stars or steller objects are in the area. Below 9th magnatude, see if any phenominon in the area would cause a mini nova like that

It was in the area of...

RA: 2 hr 40 mins
Dec: -6 degrees

So it was basically on the border of Cetus and Eridanus, where like nothing else is.

[edit on 11/3/2005 by cmdrkeenkid]

If an Iridium satellite, or any other satellite for that matter, would orbit the earth at the same speed as the earth revolves it would appear stationary, wouldn't it? I think there are allot of satellites that orbits in this manner for practical purposes. Maybe you saw a solar panel reflection after all as it adjusted alignment?

I'm no expert, just guess here, maybe this is not a feasible explanation to begin with? It just something that popped up reading your post.

You may or may not find this helpful but here goes.

I live in england, south of london. Reading your post reminded me that at approx 00.30 GMT on 4th of november, i saw a bright yellow directly "star" that appeared to be pretty much directly overhead that "pulsed". There was cloud in the sky but i was unable to tell whether it was being obscured or not.

I know nothing about working out these things but would that correlate at all with what you noticed?

Bump... Anyone heard anything that could have been what I saw? Because I still haven't figured it out!

Hmm, went through some of the past posts, not sure if I can help, but I can at least maybe stimulate some good thinking...

www.dibonsmith.com... (near the bottom)

UV Ceti is the prototype of a classification of variables known as flare stars. UV Ceti is actually component B of a binary system composed of two red dwarfs, both having a visual magnitude of only 15.5. Combined, their magnitude is about 12. Keen reported that it was well below 10th magnitude, and if I recall correctly, magnitudes are a logarithmic scale, so 12th is 'well below')

Every ten hours or so UV Ceti suddenly jumps in magnitude. (this sounds familiar, doesn't it, Keen?

In just a few seconds it will increase by three or four magnitudes, even five magnitudes on occasion. Then over the next five to ten minutes the star settles back down to its former dim self. (also matches Keen's description)

The trouble with that, is Keen reported a magnitude of 2 or so. Looking elsewhere on that same webpage, I see that:

Omicron Ceti, better known as Mira, "The Wonderful"
.... (cut for brevity)
The star has a potential range from as dim as 10 to as bright as 2.0, although it usually reaches a maximum visual magnitude of from 3 to 4. The average period is 331.96 days and the star only maintains its maximum for a few weeks, before rapidly losing its brilliance.
In the year 2000 the maximum should occur in September. But the period may change slightly. It has been known to vary from as long as 353 days to as short as 304 days. Burnham (p. 636) has a finder's chart.

That also sounds familiar, except that Omicron Ceti, according to that, stays bright for quite a bit longer. Also, depending on how the periods worked, it may have been the wrong time of year.

The plot thickens... so I decided to do a bit of searching myself. Looking here, I see two variable stars that get quite bright.

(ok, cut&paste job didn't really work here... go to the link and see the chart!)

GCVS ID R.A.
(hh mm ss.ss) Dec.
(deg mm ss) Variable Type 4 Mag. Min Mag. Max

BU Cet 0.00:32.00:40.40 -3.00:52.00:4.00 RS 3.96 3.86
alf Cet 2.00:59.00:39.70 +3.00:53.00:41.00 LB: 2.54 2.45

Trouble there, too, though... those variable stars stay fairly bright, they don't get way dimmer like Keen reported.

If you look at the 'best known stars' list on that webpage linked above, you will find several stars bright enough to be the one Keen saw, but again, they are all in the wrong places, if I read their locations correctly on the chart.

So I keep looking... my journey takes me here. On that date, they do mention that the asteroid 3 Juno is stationary at 20:00 on the date you specify (you observed the phenomenon at 21:30-45, you stated) Unless you saw Juno, nothing else on that page fits. All the binary/multiple stars are in locations other than Cetus, and all of the deep-sky objects listed are way too dim. And, according to the wikipedia entry for 3_Juno, that asteroid is not anywhere near bright enough to have been the object you saw, although it does fit the stationary requirement on that date.

So, after all my blabbering, we seem to be no closer to finding out what it is. The one thing that seems the most plausible to me (so far) is that maybe it was Omicron Ceti, but it still doesn't seem that likely to me. (way more likely than anything else I suggested, though) Hopefully, that gave someone some ideas as to where to look next...

I've seen similar phenomena on two occasions. I've looked up into the night sky and seen what appears to be bright stars that are "in the wrong place", which slowly fade from sight, without moving. Both times they were in the region of the "Tail" of Ursa Major. I'm not a particularly knowledgable astronomer, but I've spent enough time looking at the sky to have seen aircraft, satellites, meteors and fireballs, and I'm pretty bloody sure it wasn't any of those!

Hi,

Did u ever though it was an Super Nova ? The GRB are to fast to disapear, for that amount of time u said from 2 to 10 mag in 8 ".

Now it is too late, in AAVSO i think their is an link to report this case in particular.

Thx

A supernova that only lasted a few minutes and wasn't reported by millions of other astronomers? I doubt that...

me and some buddies of mine used to drink out in the desert (we live in arizona) about 45 minutes to an hour southwest of phoenix. there's little light pollution out there, and almost every night we'd see a line of anywhere between 3 and 8 bright lights appear in the sky, about 35 to 40 degrees above the horizon, always in slightly different places, but always to the west. they'd fade in over a period of about 15 minutes, and take anywhere between 20 minutes to a few hours to fade back out. they weirded us out at first, but since we never seemd to get shot by laser rays, we ended up ignoring them most of the time.

i know this likely doesn't help, as it doesn't appear that these were much the same, but if anyone has a clue as to what they were (i'm thinking it might have been the solar panels someone mentioned on geosynchronous sattelites at this point), i'm all ears.

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid
A supernova that only lasted a few minutes and wasn't reported by millions of other astronomers? I doubt that...

It is normal that other people didn´t report it, it happens all the time, the only safe site to get this info is using CHANDRA :

cxc.harvard.edu...

Please it is just an possibility, it could be variable starts to several other stuff.

Remember the nebula that had "been found" by an amatour astronomers in the Orion nebula, that now uses his name Mc Neil's nebula, LoL.(all this with an 4" Taka scope equiped with an astro CCD)

Thx