Star and flagged OP. This is a good example of why good UFO footage is hard to find. Even with a good telescope and camera setup you just cannot capture good quality footage of fast and high moving objects. The footage you captured is almost impossible to get but you got it! Good job OP, now film some orbiting mother-ships.

Originally posted by BIGPoJo
This is a good example of why good UFO footage is hard to find. Even with a good telescope and camera setup you just cannot capture good quality footage of fast and high moving objects. The footage you captured is almost impossible to get but you got it!

Thank you! I would describe it like this; this footage shows what it takes to resolve satellites so that they show shapes instead of just being point-like light sources (which can be literally any shiny thing at a sufficient distance and/or small size).

In most lights-in-the-sky footage people try to zoom in with their camcorders, the camcorder's autofocus has no idea how to properly focus a point-like light source (because it wasn't programmed with astrophotography or point-like light sources in mind), the image goes out of focus and you see a big circle called a bokeh, and then people spend time trying to analyze pictures of a bokeh which in reality tells you about the shape and quality of the optics (or lack thereof), maybe a bit about the color of the object (but not necessarily; goes to the optical quality again), but really tells you nothing else.

In the truest sense, I suppose that makes it "UFO" footage in that you can't identify it, but that does not equal or even suggest aliens or anything else paranormal. If its shape could actually be resolved, as in the footage seen here, it could be positively identified whether it be aliens or a weather balloon. I've actually had the chance to identify the latter before. To the unaided eye (and probably to camcorders as well), the balloon looked just like a reddish bizzare satellite at sunset. It was brighter than Saturn, but moved too slowly to be a low earth orbit satellite. A quick look in the telescope showed the balloon, the tether, and a payload box attached to it swinging back and forth like a pendulum. This was actually during a public viewing, so myself and a few other amateurs actually had the opportunity to show this to several people thus demonstrating the key to making identifications of point-like light sources.

The key is angular resolution. The bigger your optical diameter, the more you can resolve. A camcorder's lens just isn't all that wide, so it can't resolve much no matter how much magnification you apply. An 8" telescope, on the other hand, can resolve down to about an arcsecond in average seeing, sub-arcsecond if you stack a bunch of images.

Very nice job with all things considered ngchunter. Greatly appreciated. We always enjoy and benefit from your insight, so thanks.

A great asset to have here in this community!

thats amazing

Hi,

Very nice footage there. It looks like a dragon or something. Actually it looks almost to close to the ground to be the spacestation but I am sure it is the spacestation.

No S&N here since it is "just" the spacestation but very very nice footage indeed.

I am speechless, this is really, really impressive.

wish I could have seen it.

Originally posted by NeillieN
Dude im an editor if you send me the master file i can stabilize that for you. no charge!

Thanks! I'll upload the file to a sharing site later and PM you the link. I've done stabilization before, but just haven't had the time lately. You could probably do a better job of it than I could anyway. Video editing is not my forte.

That is very cool. very historic capture you might be able to make some money off of that someday. really awesome though.

That is just awesome, I want a telescope.