Anybody know what this was?
Last night around midnight, I noticed a bright object at about 10 o'clock (as a direction relative to due south, which would have been at 12 o'clock) in the eastern sky, and just a tad south of due east from me. It was so bright I thought at first it was an aircraft of some sort -- we get lots of them going overhead here all the time, so that wouldn't have been surprising. But its only motion for at least half an hour to three quarters of an hour was a steady one degree westward every four minutes, i.e., the same motion that the planets, Sun, Moon, and stars exhibit each day/night due to the Earth's rotation. That meant it was a celestial object of some kind. But which?
It was too far north to be a planet; planets all lie within a few degrees of the Ecliptic, which was well south of it. It was too bright for any of them, and in the wrong part of the sky; Venus, one of the only two candidates it could have been, is currently been trailing the Sun (within 45 degrees east of it), and Jupiter, the only other possibility, lay much farther east than this did. And neither Venus nor Jupiter are anywhere close to being as bright as this was; whatever the object was, on top of everything else, its light was coming through a thin, hazy cloud layer, and even then it was extremely bright.
It wasn't the Moon, either. By then, the Moon was already over the yardarm, heading west, view of it blocked completely by my apartment building, since I live on its eastern side.
So what was it? On top of everything else, it seemed to include more than one point of light, the points spaced closely together but still rather distinct -- though that could have been my eyesight which, even with glasses, is very bad when it comes to trying to resolve objects like this at distance. It wasn't an aircraft or UFO; its only motion was that steady, one-degree-every-four-minutes westward movement, and those would have been moving in other directions and other ways.
Anybody know what the thing was? I live in Seattle's North End, a little north of due west of Snoqualmie Pass, as far as my vantage goes.
It was too far north to be a planet; planets all lie within a few degrees of the Ecliptic, which was well south of it. It was too bright for any of them, and in the wrong part of the sky; Venus, one of the only two candidates it could have been, is currently been trailing the Sun (within 45 degrees east of it), and Jupiter, the only other possibility, lay much farther east than this did. And neither Venus nor Jupiter are anywhere close to being as bright as this was; whatever the object was, on top of everything else, its light was coming through a thin, hazy cloud layer, and even then it was extremely bright.
It wasn't the Moon, either. By then, the Moon was already over the yardarm, heading west, view of it blocked completely by my apartment building, since I live on its eastern side.
So what was it? On top of everything else, it seemed to include more than one point of light, the points spaced closely together but still rather distinct -- though that could have been my eyesight which, even with glasses, is very bad when it comes to trying to resolve objects like this at distance. It wasn't an aircraft or UFO; its only motion was that steady, one-degree-every-four-minutes westward movement, and those would have been moving in other directions and other ways.
Anybody know what the thing was? I live in Seattle's North End, a little north of due west of Snoqualmie Pass, as far as my vantage goes.