Low Flying Sphere

What do you think this is? At first I thought it was the ISS flying over, but It looked too big and bright.




I haven't had the chance to see the ISS flyover myself, but from other videos I've seen it seems to fly over too fast.





[edit on 7-7-2009 by Tartarspoon]

[edit on 7-7-2009 by Tartarspoon]

Wow that first vid is GOOD!

Could be a lantern or something. Seems too low and slow for a satellite flyover. I don't see any deviation of it's path either so winds are not messing with it.
Hot air balloon? It did go from bright and big to a smaller, more 2 dimensional form and then got bright again.

Very interesting! I'm stumped!

The ISS takes about 6 minutes to make a pass from horizon to horizon.
On July 3rd the ISS made a pass over Scotland at 2:20 in the morning. On that pass it was at a brightness of -2.2 (very bright). The new solar panels have really made her shine!

Your first impression would seem to be correct.

reply to post by Tartarspoon


Good find Tartarspoon.

I think it is a fake video. Why?

Because in the beginning you see a window edge on the left hand side.

Then you see some some kind of man made buildings of some sort, and then the camera appears to pan in a 360 degree motion towards the left but you never see the left side of the window edge again.

Instead of seeing the left hand side of the window edge you see the same man made buildings show up. In order for those same structures to show up he had to make a complete 360 degree sweep, and in order to do that he would have had to been in a glass jar in order not to see that left hand window edge again.

Simple explanation, its probably a prison by the looks of the structure and the light is probably a light coming from a helicopter monitoring the prison.

Originally posted by Phage
The ISS takes about 6 minutes to make a pass from horizon to horizon.
On July 3rd the ISS made a pass over Scotland at 2:20 in the morning. On that pass it was at a brightness of -2.2 (very bright). The new solar panels have really made her shine!

Your first impression would seem to be correct.

I'd say case closed! I never knew the ISS had new panels!
Thanks Phage.

Yeah if that really was the ISS, that is just awesome. Last time i saw it, it wasn't near as bright as that, was more yellowish lookin too...


PEACE!!!

There are a couple of points to this video which are worth noting. The exceptional brightness of the object (yes it's the ISS) is exaggerated by the high gain setting the camera was using. The video is fairly unusual in that the background stars are captured along with the target. That's rare from my experience. The blue brightness is another artefact of the high sensitivity. This movie seems to be from a much better quality camera than most YouTube offerings. The ISS at mag 2+ is grossly over-exposed and even shows lens flaring due to the high gain. It's shining through the clouds when they appear.
It also shows how easily people ascribe the description 'sphere' or 'orb' to any over exposed point source. As far as the camera was concerned, the ISS was nothing more than an exceptionally bright, star-like dot. Any out of focus dot like this is rendered a disc by the optics. A disc is interpretted as a sphere by the observer even when there is absolutely no evidence that it is.
Nevertheless, this is an impressive video of a low altitude pass of the Space Station (only 25 degrees maximum in Dundee that morning).

WG3

reply to post by waveguide3


That did cross my mind, but I assumed that the stars would have been exaggerated also. I'm glad you pointed that out. Next time I will keep an eye out for the same effect.