Originally posted by camouflaged
Sorry i should of mentioned the duration also, it was quick moving and lasted not even a minute. maybe around the 40 second mark.
No problem. It's easy to miss the odd detail here and there when the adrenalin is flowing.
That time frame fits with an ISS/satellite sighting, so I think that pretty much confirms what you saw was the ISS.
Originally posted by camouflaged
im only new to this so im not o sure what you mean by the objects path in relation to celestrial object's, do you mean what planets it was closest to
at the time i seen it?
Again, not a problem. A novice would not be expected to know how to accurately describe the path an object appeared to take in the sky. It is quite
simple to do though, and can be a great help when trying to identify an unknown object in the sky.
There are basically two ways of doing it:
1/ You only need two numbers to describe a the position of an object in the sky. The first is the direction, with North being 0 degrees, and South
being 180 degrees. West would be 270 degrees and so on.
The second number describes the altitude in the sky. 0 degrees would be an object on the horizon (it would have to be at sea or on a very immense and
flat plain, because those are the only paces where the true horizon can actually be seen).
An object directly above your head would be at 90 degrees, so numbers between 0-90 degrees are all valid
for the altitude.
If you stretch out your arm and make a fist, holding it as if you were going to give a "thumbs up", from the top of the fist to the bottom of the
fist is roughly 5 degrees, so can use it to estimate distance in degrees in the sky.
2/ Learn your way around the stars/planets and the constellations if you want to take it a step further, which is what I was referring to when I said
"celestial objects". It's not that hard to learn the stars with the help of planetarium software like the freely available
Stellarium.
Originally posted by camouflaged
I don't mind if you use what i said as an example, i guess its like the sun, it appears small if it wasn't lit up, but because of its brightness it
appears closer.
Thanks. The sun is not a bad example - it does look deceptively close when it's quite a long way away (about 147 million km away), but it's also
massive, so its about 0.5 degrees across, which is large compared to the majority of celestial objects, apart from the moon of course which rivals it
for size.
The extreme brightness of the sun, likely has a lot to do with how close it looks too. I made a
thread on the subject of estimating distance of UFOs last December, which goes into
some detail about how our brains interpret bright objects.
It's not a simple subject, but basically out brain makes assumptions based on how we as humans have evolved to see things on the ground. Eg a car
head light that is big and bright is lightly to be very close to you - your brain interpenetrating things as being big and bright when they are close
has obvious survival implications for our species, but although it works well on the ground, the assumptions the brain makes for
unknownobjects
seen in the sky, where there are usually few if any cues to help our brains work out distance, the assumptions fall apart.
It's under these conditions (unfamiliar objects and lack of distance cues), when we are prone to optical illusions, and that is what is happening
when you see something big and bright appearing to be closer than it actually is.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a celestial object, but more often than not it is, since it's not uncommon for people to take for granted how
bright celestial objects can sometimes appear to be. Meteors are a great example, and the reason I'm personally interested in this subject. Bright
meteors are surprisingly common, and often misidentified as UFOs for the same reason (there are other factors that can also contribute to this) in my
experience.
The ISS for example has an apparent magnitude (brightness) of around -3.5 (or a little more), but some satellites
(
Iridiums for example) can suddenly brighten
to -9 magnitude which is hundreds/thousands of times brighter than what you saw. Close to the
brightness of the moon. Meteors can be hundreds/thousands of times brighter again -
brighter than the sun in some cases, although that is fairly rare (perhaps once a year somewhere on earth).
