@withawhy,
(I just typed out a long reply, but the forum software deleted everything I'd typed, because I'd logged in again since starting to read this thread yesterday. What an annoying bug! I'll have to start again, from memory.)
withawhy;30525 wrote:Have any of you seen anything out of the ordinary in the sky?
Only once (apart from a rapidly moving green light I couldn't identify, one night towards the end of last year.)
I scribbled out some notes of my observations, but did nothing with them - expecting neither to be believed by anyone else, nor to be able to make any sense of the observations myself.
I drew a rough sketch map of the night sky, as seen shortly before 1 a.m. on Tuesday 1 August 1989, somewhere in England. (I failed to note where, but I could still ask the guy I was on holiday with.)
It shows 3 faint "stars", all apparently moving at absurdly high speed along the same "apparent straight line or gentle curve", possibly a great circle around the Earth, passing along the three points at the top of the W of the constellation of Cassiopeia.
For some reason, I have marked that there was an apparent angle of 40 degrees between Epsilon Cassiopeiae (the star at the top left) and the apparent centre of the visible sky at the time.
Of the three "stars", #2 was moving to my right along the orbit (as seen with the W of Cassiopeia upright in my field of view), and #1 and #3 (see note below) to my left.
My scrawled handwritten notes read, word for word, as follows:
Quote: All seemed to go at about the same speed.
Very roughly, I estimate that while I was calling for John, No. 1 covered about 80 degrees of arc in about 40 seconds.
This means that if it was orbiting the Earth, it was doing so once every 3 minutes, therefore it would have been travelling at over 500,000 miles per hour! So it cannot have been an artificial satellite, as I had at first thought. (But I had been astonished at its speed, and its visibility.)
Nos. 2 and 3, travelling in opposite directions, appeared at about the same time, shortly after John arrived. It seemed entirely possible that No. 3 was No. 1, on its second time around the Earth - the gap between their appearances seemed roughly compatible with their speed of motion across the sky.
They all looked like faint stars, of about the same apparent brightness. They did not at all look like aircraft. They appeared to move in straight lines, or very smooth and almost straight curves - indeed they all seemed to follow roughly the same path, as shown above.
Could I (and my companion on the holiday) have simply misinterpreted the passing of three aircraft on the same flightpath? Can an aircraft flying high enough to be completely silent cover 80 degrees of arc in 40 seconds?