I don’t know about you guys, but that looks like gravitational lensing to me. That is to say, something that is absolutely not a normal thing to see.
Eclipse489 on
Some more info:
It was around ~3 degrees long, and maybe ~1-2 wide. I saw it first by eye where it looked like a very large plane, but cloudier and moving at about the same speed a plane at a couple thousand ft altitude would move. Once I noticed how odd it looked I checked it out through my binoculars (I was awaiting an ISS passover at the time), and saw that most of the apparent structure looked more like smoke or haze and that the only visible object was a tiny white dot in the center of it. But the entire thing (smoke/haze and dot) was moving at the same speed in tandem, there was no contrail beyond the short trail on the right side of it that stayed the same length the entire time.
The small dot did not resolve into anything with a shape even in my binoculars (the FOV of which is around 4.4 degrees in angular diameter), but was pretty bright (the star Spica was in the sky at the time, I would guess this was around the same magnitude).
The motion of it was steady, in one direction. I saw it first at around 30 degrees up in the southern sky, it moved eastward at the same height for maybe around a minute after I saw it, until it was behind trees and out of view. The speed was as said above, probably similar to the speed of a pretty low flying airliner, maybe a bit slower. The ”tail” was facing opposite the direction it was moving.
Overall just really confused on this, if it was orbital the atmospheric haze phenomena would make no sense, but if it was an aircraft it had no discernable shape.
2 Comments
I don’t know about you guys, but that looks like gravitational lensing to me. That is to say, something that is absolutely not a normal thing to see.
Some more info:
It was around ~3 degrees long, and maybe ~1-2 wide. I saw it first by eye where it looked like a very large plane, but cloudier and moving at about the same speed a plane at a couple thousand ft altitude would move. Once I noticed how odd it looked I checked it out through my binoculars (I was awaiting an ISS passover at the time), and saw that most of the apparent structure looked more like smoke or haze and that the only visible object was a tiny white dot in the center of it. But the entire thing (smoke/haze and dot) was moving at the same speed in tandem, there was no contrail beyond the short trail on the right side of it that stayed the same length the entire time.
The small dot did not resolve into anything with a shape even in my binoculars (the FOV of which is around 4.4 degrees in angular diameter), but was pretty bright (the star Spica was in the sky at the time, I would guess this was around the same magnitude).
The motion of it was steady, in one direction. I saw it first at around 30 degrees up in the southern sky, it moved eastward at the same height for maybe around a minute after I saw it, until it was behind trees and out of view. The speed was as said above, probably similar to the speed of a pretty low flying airliner, maybe a bit slower. The ”tail” was facing opposite the direction it was moving.
Overall just really confused on this, if it was orbital the atmospheric haze phenomena would make no sense, but if it was an aircraft it had no discernable shape.