here about 3 years ago in the sky overhead? Let me clarify: I did not see the craft pictured here, but I saw blinking lights and a gassy pattern around it much like in this picture. I watched it for about 20 minutes with binoculars until it moved and faded out of sight. To the naked eye (and with my not-so-great night vision) it was just a gray-ish smudge in the sky, which is what caught my attention, but it was very clear with binos. I was totally stunned and never able to find out how to find out what it was that I saw. I was looking all over the internet, but I didn’t even know what to call what I saw. Today in one of the threads about watching the ISS go overhead, somebody said they would love to see a “spacecraft firing its retrorockets” and I was intrigued to find out more about what exactly that might look like. I came across this image in a related web article, and it’s about as close to what I saw as anything I have ever seen.
Now that years have passed, I probably have no way of researching what was passing overhead that night (I’m not even sure I could remember which night it was at this point), but could I have seen some satellite firing “retrorockets” or something that would have been visible to me through binoculars that night?