Originally posted by martinhuyton
Do you commit quality time to sky watching? By that I mean...Do you leave the distractions of your home, family, television, games console and pc etc
to carry out some serious studies of the sky? Do you leave your town or city to escape light pollution so that you can actually see the sky in order
to study it?
I spend on average 30 minutes to an hour each night, every night (unless somethings on TV I really want to watch) looking up at the sky, live in a
small town and the light pollution is pretty small, and only really heavy on a small part of the horizon.
Seen a few interesting things over the last 7 years or so ive lived here. A great green bolloid meteor (best ive seen so far covered a good 80% of the
sky leaving a nice green trail behind it), hundreds of shooting stars of all types, point meteors, numerous (some really BIG) iridium flares, LOTS of
satellites... finally managed to identify Taurus last night, or at least part of it.
Only really interesting things ive seen was a string of 3 roughly satellite strength lights traveling close together in a straight line with another
light running along side parallel with the front one forming a backward facing L a year back (still cant find any info on groups of satellites like
that, and I havent seen em again).
Ive seen a handful of satellites curve real pronounced in the sky a few times, I was always under the impression they kept a fairly straight course,
but these have traveled noticeable archs (one a few nights back almost made it to about 60 degree difference compared to when i first spotted it). And
I saw a shooting star a few months ago that broke up into fragments as it streaked over head, was pretty cool especially since I had only just gone
outside and looked up pretty much right as it happened.
So apart from the string of lights, nothing much for me... but if i do see something, hey ATS will know about it.
Interestingly about 2 years ago we had an odd incident at our house where my mother went to bed early and made mention that she noticed an interesting
series of flashs at the window of her and dads bedroom (as if from outside) the neighboring farm house had its lights off and any flashing from the
road would have been obscured from the neighbors and the trees on our fence line. Latter that night a number of us awoke to an odd rythmic banging ie
a bang every second with about 3-4 bangs followed by a short 4-5 second pause on the corner of the house where my twin sisters room is. Most of us
didnt get up to investigate and a few of the family didnt hear it, I heard my sisters talking about it so got up and they said it was coming from the
roof in the corner of their room, I heard it a a few more times before it stopped and it was definitely coming from the roof of their rooms corner
(theirs nothing but roof there since we have no attic space in our house... That was about the extent of it, and it stopped around the time I talked
to them. Their was no damage to the roof the next morning, no tree was near the wall, and the weather was calm that night. But it hasnt happened
again. So who knows. I would have gone out on the night, but im a chicken when it comes to possibly running into one of 'them'
Edit:- hmm yeah misleading title, although I do think he's got a point.
[edit on 25-2-2009 by BigfootNZ]