Just a brief post to talk about what I saw in sky this morning. A friend sent me a link about a celestial event taking place in our skies at the moment. Well actually there are two events: one, the its Aquariid meteor shower and, two, the Comet Swan. This is the biggest comet we have had for some time and as it is unlikely to visit again for a few thousand years, I thought I’d get up and have a look.
After a restless night, I dragged myself out and down to the beach. There are few street lights in the village and so light pollution was never going to be an issue.
I set up the gear and watched and waited. At around 5:00am I noticed a fast moving light in the sky. Thinking that its was a satellite I aimed the camera around to pick up a shot. It was then that I noticed another, and another, and another. Pretty soon there were around ten or more all following the same trajectory across the heavens. Too high and fast for a plane, but too low to be on the same altitude as the space station.
To make it even more interesting, these lights seemed to just pop out of the night sky at exactly the same place like emerging from a worm hole in the sky. WEIRD!!!
By the time it was all over, there must have been almost fifty of these lights which headed north by north east and disappeared from view far to the north.
As the sun began to taint the darkness of the sky with a dirty orange haze, the temperature dropped what seemed a dozen degrees. The dawn arrives very slowly at the lower latitudes and the sky took on a golden hue at a snail pace while the cold began to seep into every joint. I had decided to take a time lapse of the day’s awakening but as time dragged on I soon came to regret the decision. My feet were the first to suffer as they quietly stopped letting me know they were still attached. Next came the shins with feeling that a slight tap with a hammer would shatter them like glass. I took to jumping up and down on the sand until I noticed a watcher on the lookout above the beach, no doubt wondering if she should call for the men in white coats.
The answer came later that day after talking with my son. We ruled out planes and space stations and were reluctant to go down the road of UFO’s but with the lack of other evidence there were few other options.
Then a breakthrough in a post from a news outlet in South Carolina who had also seen a photo in a similar vein. It turns out that Space Ex have a huge number of satellites racing around the world bringing us all a broadband service. This morning they just happened across my patch of sky
