It was a clear day and I was laying on the grass with my baby boy and I saw an odd white spec in the sky. I pulled out my phone and launched the Stellarium app and was surprised to find that it was Cosmos 1437 r, a Kosmos rocket second stage that launched a Soviet communications satellite in 1983.
I guess the sun was hitting it just right. I ran inside to get my actual camera but then I couldn't find it anymore.
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1prvlop
13 Comments
Is this an ad for the Stellarium app?
This is more likely a coincidence. The ISS isn’t visible during the day, let alone an old soviet booster.
That’s pretty dope man. Awesome!!
I seriously doubt that. Much more likely to be a happy coincidence. You can’t even see the ISS during the day.
I think that looks an awful lot like a weather balloon!
There’s a great website that tracks all of them, hopefully someone can link it here!
Which app are you using? I miss Space junk
Wouldn’t that orbit have degraded by now and burnt up?
Stellarium was how I found I actually saw the ISS a couple weeks ago. It was an extremely bright dot in the night sky, too bright to be a satellite, but there was no blinking so not a plane either. I open Stellarium and there it is, the ISS.
Our brains are shrinking omg
I saw something similar from Tucson this afternoon, probably around 4pm (MST). Where/when did you see it?
Awesome!! I’m gonna have to download that app!
I spent way to long on the first picture looking in the tree for a model rocket🤦🏻♂️
Was it a blinking glinting light or just a flat white object moving along the sky? Large, tumbling objects can occasionally reflect light just right to be able to see during daylight, but only in short blinks. VERY large reflective objects like the ISS can have the same effect. I looked up the size of the rocket, and at best it would be around a magnitude -2 or if I get extremely generous with approximation a -3. This would be around the same brightness as Jupiter which is almost impossible to see with the naked eye in daylight. If it was distinctly bright for more than a few seconds across the sky it was probably something else. If it got very bright very quickly and then dark again, possibly a few times, it may have been the satellite.