Cloudy at your location? Don't have safe solar viewing gear? Come watch today's partial solar eclipse live right here! *Spotted a UFO

If this started at 6pm...

and the UFO was at (about) 27 minutes XX seconds...

Maybe someone can go look at the solarham images for the UTC 23:27:xx time frame to confirm the location of those two moving dots?

likes like a pair of jets

wow crazy ufo lol at 25min or so crazy it was during a livecast ;p

Now that you mention it and I've watched it about 4 times. They do have a shape of Chinook helicopter.

Yep, thrust coming out of the end opposite their direction of travel.

Problem is that they don't look very aerodynamic at all. So either there's some sort of visual distortion and they really are aerodynamic, or they're in LEO using thrusters and don't have to be aerodynamic.

Astro's suspect, too. They appear right at the sunspot in the viewfinder exactly after he says to go back to watching the sunspot and see if a bright flare happens. Too close a coincidence for a lame joke, I think. So was this a flyby Astro knew was coming? But what would be the point of that? To fake a UFO sighting by Astro? Again, why? Well perhaps because the last person to ever admit a UFO would be Astro, so if he then accepts it as one (as he's done) it would be a form of normalizing or accepting them past a certain threshold of denial that's remained intact and defended by people like (and including) Astro.

Or maybe it's a real UFO, and they choose Astro to reveal themselves precisely because he's such a jerk about them. Maybe this is just the Star League saying "neaner neaner."

Great video! Thanks Doc!

Not a joke, I swear, God as my witness, not a joke, not a hoax. Shit just happened. I had no idea this would happen. It probably is just something lame like balloons, but I did not set this up. Even if I had wanted to I didn't have the time to organize and fake this. I did the entire webcast live.

I started about 10 minutes early. Judging by the time of the posts here in the thread reacting to it, it was about 22:17. We're 4 hours behind UT on eastern time, not 5.

Last Edited by Astromut on 10/23/2014 11:41 PM

Mister Astro. Welcome to the "Shocked by possible first sight of UFO's" club :D Sadly mine turned out to be ducks flying in formation. You should look at FR24 and see if there were any aircraft in the direction you looked. Usually a B737 would be the size of those two planes and a half combined. At least if I got your optical configuration right. Never hurts to keep an open mind though.

If those objects were within the atmosphere, they're just something flying by. If they were satellites, given the azimuth, elevation and time while traversing the sun, a rough two line element set should be doable. Then, at spacecraft midnight you should be able to see them again against a dark sky. Some of you young minds might get your heads around this as it's really doable.
Ah, your latitude, longitude, and elevation is needed for that solution too.

Last Edited by Gomer on 10/24/2014 12:01 AM

OK let me ask a question. If your zoomed in enough to the sun spot on the sun how the fuck would you see a small as balloon the size of earth crossing the plane of the sun? You wouldn't see a balloon zoomed in that far. Stop being so hard headed.

Huh? The balloon wouldn't be the size of the earth. The distance to the island across the bay was about 3 miles. If they were balloons that lifted off the island they'd be in focus along with the sun at that kind of distance.

I know how to calculate all that, but there isn't enough information here; we don't have exact coordinates as the only firm frame of reference in the sun itself which is mostly featureless with the exception of the sunspot. Maybe that's enough for a circular approximation. Maybe. Too tired at this point to figure it out. And I need exact measurements of the size and location of that sunspot for 22:17 UT.

Last Edited by Astromut on 10/24/2014 12:07 AM

I saw the same dots from Louisiana. I was Looking at it with a welders hood. We couldn't figure out what they were.

Even the Sun has coordinates Mister Astro. I am not quite sure in what system, but that spot is pinpointed as [Coordinates] somewhere. This could be a nice reference to start off from, along with an imaginary, preferably dotted line going through the optical axis of your telescope :D Worth a shot!

They looked like two F-15's, but you probably would have heard them. Lol

:ohcrap:

I saw the eclipse today through my Coronado PST. The great treat was, the moon, monster sunspot and a nice prominence on the Eastern Limb. Unfortunately that mount is tough to get a good polar alignment with, so I couldn't image it. But me and my friends witnessed it and that is all that counts.

Doc, maybe it was the ISS?

here's a couple ISS sun crossings from YouTube:







Now I know these are faster, but I'm willing to bet they were looking at the sun in the middle of the day.

You were watching the sun in the afternoon on the horizon... in fact, I remember you catching the sun set. So I bet it would seem that the ISS takes longer to traverse that area on the horizon of your viewing point.

If it's not the ISS then it's probably a satellite or a big orbital telescope or something! You should try to find the times from yesterday when you were filming, and check the location of big objects like the ISS, or that Chinese station, or Hubble, etc...

Peace Doc! Love your live stream and vids and pics!

Here's a plane crossing the sun...

Anyone caught that from another location? There was some person here claiming to saw it from Louisiana...
That can be a multitude of things...Balloons,satellites,planes... Maybe the BlackKnight...
One thing is for sure.It remains a UFO because no one could yet identify it.

Tsk tsk...

Not ISS. Even at low altitudes it wouldn't take a minute and a half. Plus that's not what it looks like. I'll do some calculations later.

Stacked image:
:ar2192:

Looks like a mouse sitting on a dog.
Baaa, a space ink-blot.

Imaged it yesterday morning, too (about 10:00 hours earlier).

:spar2192a:

:spar2192:

.

Very nice!

Any more thoughts on what the UFO could have been?

SO featured your UFO's in his video today.