[Chaos-l] It's not a space station, It's a MOON , well alsmost

[Jayme Hanzak]

Yesterday at around 8:20 to 8:30 pm, I was walking out to my telescope. I
looked up and saw a very bright object in the sky, The Sun was setting at
first I thought that it was the Space Station going over head but that
wasn't the case, I  wasn't moving. 
	So I quickly started running through all the bright stars that it could
possibly be, but there aren't any bright stars in that part of the sky.
Jupiter is rising in the East  so it wasn't Jupiter and it couldn't be
Saturn, this object was to far North and almost at Zenith. It still was in
the same part of the sky. Not moving but very bright. It wasn't a plane,
I've been looking at it for far to long and it still hasn't moved. 
Could this be an asteroid or something moving extremely close to the
Earth. 

Visions of "Deep Impact", raced through my mind. 

It's been 5 minutes now and it is still there. What is this object. Well
it's not moving and I have a telescope, I better find out what it is and
prepare the world for the bad news.

I rolled off the roof of my observatory and released my scope. Looking up,
I could see that it was still there. It is now approaching 10 minutes
since I set eyes on it. 

There it is in my view finder, out of focus I start to sharpen up the
object. "WHAT" I passed through focus, "This thing is Huge!"  At least 4
times the size of Jupiter. What the heck I passed through focus again. 

Wait, there it is, in focus, it has something hanging from it. "It's a
weather balloon. Thank God! It's going up, not coming down. At least not
yet."

I had time to go into the house, get the family and walk back out to the
observatory , and the balloon was still sitting where I saw it 12 to 15
minutes earlier. I watched it as the sun set and the shadow of the earth
slowly darkened it.  

Did any one else catch a glimpse of the rogue moon? I mean weather baloon.

Clear Skie!



Jayme Hanzak
Special Projects Engineer
jhanzak at unctv.org
www.unctv.org