Friday, August 17, 2012

What Did I Capture...

On the night of August 12th, I went out to see if I could shoot the meteor shower over the City of Toronto. I didn't even see a single meteor that night before the clouds came in, but I did see 'something'. EXIF data shows that the photo below was taken at 11:03PM, though, I tweeted what I saw at 11:02PM (so, 11:01 - 11:02PM is a likely timeframe). The photo was shot from about 10 feet from the waters edge adjacent to the H20 'beach', shot north over the Skydome.
This was a 10 second exposure, and the light 'flash' lasted approximately 5 of those seconds.

What I saw was what appeared to be a light, growing in intensity, then snapping out. There was no visual movement across the sky, it stayed in the same place. Note, it MAY have been moving, just not visible as such to the naked eye. I've seen something similar to this before, being close to the flightpath of the Island Airport, it's looks similar to a plane coming at you head on, barely being able to see it, then it gradually getting brighter. However, you can see some movement in the airplane headlights that was NOT visible with this.

Photo 1 - Full Shot of Location. (If anyone wants a reference, the CN Tower is 1815' 3" tall)
(Click for Larger View)



Photo 3 - Reference shot, taken immediately after previous photos.

(Click for Larger View)


If you think you know what it is, please leave a comment.

EDIT- Here's a 'better' view of it's location in relation to the stars. The object in question is the white object to the North East of the bottom of the Big Dipper, just to the North East of the smaller reddish star.

EDIT 2 - Removed photo 2 to avoid confusion.

1 comment:

  1. Ok, what you saw was undoubtedly Envisat as someone mentioned a while back. No idea why it flashed like that, but the pass is *precisely* where it should be at that time:

    http://www.heavens-above.com/passdetails.asp?lat=43.66092&lng=-79.45518&loc=Unspecified&alt=0&tz=EST&satid=27386&date=41134.1240762037&size=600

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