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Shooting Stars Or UFOs?

Steve Saker

Fresh Blood
Joined
Aug 30, 2018
Messages
9
Location
Leicester
Having spent quite a few nights sitting outside and watching the skies, I live on the outskirts of town on the edge of a field, I was quite surprised to see a shooting star closely followed by another, I've been told this is lucky and thought this is a good sign as |I could do with some luck right now!.
As I sat gazing upwards, mid July clear skies following the amazing summer we've just had, I then noticed that there were literally dozens of shooting stars all moving in the same direction, North, this spectacle continued into the early hours of the morning when I decided that I really needed to sleep.
It occurred to me the next morning that if there really were so many constant shooting stars would there be so many travelling in the same direction? the speed of these things was literally a flash across the sky and gone. At one point there was even a flash in the far distance seconds after a shooting star had passed over, to be honest it looked like a scene from Star Wars that night I was even surprised there was no follow up in the Leicester Mercury over the next few days (my local paper).
Are these shooting star occurrences a regular thing? Do they happen during day light hours when we obviously can't see? I'm sure I wasn't the only star gazer that night and are they shooting stars? or is something going on up there that were oblivious to down here?
 
Generally speaking, meteors can and will enter the atmosphere at any time (24 / 7) and track in any direction.

A cluster of meteor entries can happen at any time.

Certain recurrent such clusterings of meteor activity ('meteor showers') are predictable events. These occur when the earth encounters a collective set of 'space rocks' in a certain region of the earth's orbital path. During meteor showers the tracks / paths tend to radiate from a particular point or region of the sky (typically to the east in the early morning hours).

One of these major recurrent showers - the Perseids - recently occurred from mid-July through late August.

It's not clear from your post exactly when your sighting(s) occurred, but I suspect you were seeing the recent Perseid shower.

https://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-shower-calendar/
 
Thanks for the update I'll follow that link and look back on the calendar dates!
 
The meteors in a shower like the Persieds do not all travel in the same direction. Instead they travel in various directions but all seeming to radiate from a common point of origin. Steve said thus occurred in mid July but the Persieds aren’t highly active until their peak around August 11. Also, before midnight the radiant would have been in the east/northeast sky so most of the Persieds he could see would have been travelling toward the west and south. There are two other meteor showers in late July but they are much less prolific than the Perseids. Casual observers wouldn’t even notice them as a shower.

Steve - about how frequent were the meteors on average? How many could have been counted in an hour, roughly?
 
Hi
Sorry for the delay in replying (been a bit busy) I only watched the sky for an hour and counted about 40 but some grouped shooting stars moved too quickly to count, I was literally counting streak after streak sometimes a few shot across the sky at the same time making it difficult to count, I wasn't prepared otherwise i would have filmed it and slowed it down! I only really took notice because there were so many moving in the same direction. The speed of these things was amazing I have no idea how many I missed when I blinked!
 
. The speed of these things was amazing

Yep meteors, seen lots usually silver (white), occasionally gold, green once (assume lots of copper) and red, have also seen them split in two. If they are slow moving they are satallites or the ISS. A bright flash is sunlight hitting a satallite at just the right angle, believe it's called an Iridium Flare, you can get Apps for it.
Then again there are vidoes filmed in infrared showing weird stuff flying in the night sky !.
 
This seems as good a place as any to recount this tale from Zebs' past.

This took place several years ago when I was in my late teens. Mam and I went outside to watch the Perseids meteor shower, for the first time. We watched as loads of meteors streaked downwards across the sky, all emanating more or less from the same direction, and all going in straight lines, as you'd expect.

Except for one... which moved distinctly differently from the rest and to this day I believe it was not a meteor. It came downwards at an angle but then turned back around, almost in a J shape if you will, and vanished. Nothing else in the sky that night moved in that way, and I've never forgotten it.

And even though I've watched other meteor showers over the years and looked up at starry skies many a time, I've never seen owt like it since.

Here is a rough Paint sketch of what I saw. Blue lines are normal meteors, orange is the anomaly. Green arrow shows the direction it came from.

upload_2018-9-26_13-11-34.png


I'd be interested to know if anyone has seen something similar. I've always felt that whatever this was, it was using the meteor shower as a way of hiding itself, if that makes sense.
 
Yes ... I've seen what appear to be abrupt turns in a meteor's path on multiple occasions.

The problem lies in determining whether the tangential path represents the original meteor or just a chunk that's broken off under the stresses of atmospheric resistance and heating.
 
Yes ... I've seen what appear to be abrupt turns in a meteor's path on multiple occasions.

The problem lies in determining whether the tangential path represents the original meteor or just a chunk that's broken off under the stresses of atmospheric resistance and heating.
Yes, a meteor can sometimes bounce off the atmosphere, perhaps it can even end up back in space.
 
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