Once when I was a kid, 80’s to 90’s, I saw what seemed liked a meteor take off from one star and hit another one nearby ( it could have been planets - i didn’t know the difference back then and even now it is difficult for me).
So, my question is - what was that ?
Oh one more thing - it happened incredibly fast. Like it started and was over in a couple of seconds
Probably just a meteor.
Nothing “took off” or hit anything else, it just looked that way to you.
I am pretty sure it did
Since objects in the sky (deep space objects, not ones in the atmosphere) are enormously far apart, if you saw an object traveling from one to another, in a few seconds, that would imply that it was traveling faster than the speed of light, which is unlikely.
Stars and planets aren’t nearby.
ETA: Even Mercury and Venus are more than two light-minutes apart at their closest.
Have a local astronomy group show you what regular meteors look like. There are showers several times a year and you can usually go to a park or such to have an astronomer give a talk, help you watch for streaks, and look through a big telescope. Once you see the streaks from a meteor shower, you’ll probably recognize it as what you saw. They’re just little white or yellow streaks that come and go in the blink of an eye; what you’re hoping for is one of the rarer, longer, brighter ones.
The most beautiful one I ever saw was a bizarre occurrence. I couldn’t sleep - tried and tried, for hours. Got up and wandered around the house in the dark. Finally stepped out on the back porch. Looked up… and a huge, brilliant, bright yellow streak went right across the center of my vision, at least 1/10 of the sky arc long. At that utterly unpredictable second.
The only better one I ever saw was a re-entering shuttle that was on a high entry arc and went right over Northern California. We waited in the dawn, spotting faint streaks and wondering if that was it (THAT was it?) Then a giant magenta streak went over, taking a full minute to go horizon to horizon. I think I literally drooled on my chest.
We got up to see Columbia pass over, too, and heard it through the cloud cover. Didn’t know for hours that it was actually beginning to break up above us.
Have seen a couple of meteor showers, visited planetariums and even scanned some stars through a telescope at the Physics/Astronomy department during college years. Also have a Celestron which I use sometimes to watch stars at night with my kid.
It definitely was not a regular meteor.
How was it different? Brightness? Speed?
I’m guessing it was just a particularly bright meteor.
If you deny that it was a “regular” meteor, then what else could it have been? There are reasons why it couldn’t have been anything else, so what’s left besides meteor?
Maybe it was a satellite flare—it sounds a bit early for the Iridium network, which produces the most spectacular flares (the first ones went up in 1997), but other satellites can produce a similar effect if the sunlight strikes them at just the right angle.
Just saying “it wasn’t that” doesn’t help any. You need to explain exactly what you saw and WHY you think it couldn’t be a regular meteor if you want anyone to take a stab at an explanation.
I was hesitant to post the question maybe I shouldn’t have done so. All my adult life, I have sought an explanation for what I saw, but to no avail. All I can say is it was definitely not a meteor as I have seen described and first hand.
It originated from a star or a body in the sky and ended in another one. I can understand your frustration and I hope you can understand mine.
Probably terrestrial.
A bird, bat, or insect.
It’s also possible that the fact that it happened when you were a child warped your memory of a fairly mundane meteor, satellite passing by, or similar to something far more extravagant than it really was.
What I cannot understand is why you are seemingly either unwilling or unable to explain exactly what you observed that makes you come to this rather bizarre interpretation of what happened.
Maybe true - but since the time I saw it, I’ve been asking around and reading up a lot. And for the last 30 years the answer has always been : you imagined it or that wasn’t what you saw :). I’ve learned hence to not ask the question. The events in Russia, brought it to mind again and I posted it hoping someone will know (or maybe I need to do better job of accepting that it wasn’t so…)
Saying it happened sometime in the 1980’s or 1990’s is pretty vague. As precisely as possible, when did it happen? How old were you at the time? Where were you at the time? (The particular city, at least.) I’m presuming that you were just outside your house at the time, so can you remember where in relation to your house you were? It would be nice to know what direction you were looking. Was anyone else with you? What did they say they saw? Did you tell anyone else at the time? What are their memories of what you said at the time?
I exactly observed a meteor like object originate from one star (or an object in sky) shoot to another star (or an object in sky). It was over in a couple of seconds.
That’s what I saw - not an interpretation.
If you say it was ‘meteor-like’, but definitely not a ‘regular’ meteor, what was it that set it apart from other meteors? The fact that it seemed to go from one star to another? I mean, all meteors seem to originate at one point in the sky, and terminate at another; that there’d be a star at each point is not too much of a coincidence.
Well, then you say “object in the sky,” do you mean you could actually see something bigger than a point of light? Since, other than the moon and sun, there are no celestial objects that appear as more than points to the human eye.