The weird, weird month of May

 

Possible weather balloon

Along with the flowers and the increased daylight hours, May seems to bring odd sightings in the sky more than the other months. Last year, there was the unusual aurora borealis visible from here in Tucson. Also that month, I tracked a strange pair of satellites across the sky that were accompanied by a small cloud. The satellites were moving way too slow to be in low-earth orbit, but they were also moving too fast to be up as high as the geostationary satellites. They were both moving in the same direction (generally south to north), but they also drifted further apart as they went, and the cloud faded from view after half an hour, or so. Interestingly, it was the cloud that was noticed by the unaided eyes of my daughter, who pointed it out to me. One very tiny cloud in an otherwise clear sky. Weird! When I got my telescope aimed at the cloud and started shooting some pictures, that was when we saw the short satellite streaks. The satellites could not be seen by the naked eye.

Last night, while I was setting up my scope at sundown, my daughter was in the back yard with me. While dodging some dive-bombing bats, she noticed a bright light high up in the sky. It was not starlike but was rather somewhat of an extended object. It seemed stationary. She called it to my attention, and it looked to me like some weather balloons I've seen in the past. 

Cool! A weather balloon! You don't see those every day!

Like the strange satellites last May, though, I took the time to get an image of it after setting up my scope. The balloon was very high overhead, so its shape was round, like a balloon would look from below, and not the teardrop shape it would have if viewed from the side. A Google search revealed some modern balloons that look more like pumpkins than the traditional weather balloon shape I've gotten used to, and Google images of those pumpkin balloons looked practically identical to the one I took (at the top of this page). Of course, the Google search had some other results reminding us that balloons like this are not just for weather anymore! They could be for gathering other kinds of intelligence. 

Winds aloft will carry a weather balloon far away from its launch point. Even so, the motion of this balloon was rather slow. I had to follow it manually with my scope to keep it in the field of view, but it was not difficult. I could push it off to one side of the frame and work on getting the scope focused while the balloon made its way back toward center. The constant push in mostly one direction is similar to the steady one-directional movements of satellites. That got me to thinking about another weird object I saw a few nights ago, on May 18th.

It was more than an hour later in the evening than last night's balloon, which could explain why the object (if it was also a balloon) was much fainter. While I was hunting for supernovae, I targeted galaxy NGC 5102, which was, at the time, low in the southern sky. I had the image window zoomed in with the galaxy in the center, so I couldn't see objects near the edges of the frame, and I paused shooting to adjust my focus, unaware that an object was passing through. It was while I was taking short exposures that I noticed another "galaxy" in the frame. Whoa! Supernovae appear as "new stars" in distant galaxies, but whole galaxies shouldn't pop up out of nowhere on any given night! 

The new "galaxy" moved from one focus image to the next. Hmmm. Satellites are the only objects I've seen move through the field of view like that, but this one was very fuzzy, as if out-of-focus with respect to the stars. I didn't look at its path very closely, but it looked as though it was moving in a straight line, like satellites do. But how could it be out of focus? I don't notice any difference in focus between low-earth orbit satellites (200 miles up) and geostationary satellites (much higher at 20,000 miles), so why should this satellite be so fuzzy? Maybe it's outgassing something that created a cloudy haze around it.

Or, after last night's experience, what if it, too, was a weather balloon?

NGC 5102 and the "fuzzy satellite."
The bright star is Iota Centauri.

This morning, I assembled the fuzzy-satellite images into an animated GIF to get a better look at the shape of its path. Indeed, it was not moving in a straight line! The gap in the sequence occurred because I was focusing as the object neared the center of the frame, and I didn't save the focus images. But you can see that interpolating its position in the missing images wouldn't create a straight line. The object was moving like a skipping stone across the surface of a body of water!

The movement of this object was fairly slow. There are 9 images in the sequence, and each image represents 20 seconds of exposure time. There's also about 8 seconds of readout/download time for each image, plus a 4-second delay between images. All told, it took about 7 minutes for the object to traverse the 1-degree field of view.

Same as the previous image, except
for the addition of a reference line.

Given the slow speed, the wavy path, and its being out of focus, I can believe that this object was a weather balloon. As a matter of fact, I can't think of anything else it could have been. But I'm more inclined to shrug my shoulders at objects like these that defy explanations than I am to believe that they are paranormal or aliens!

In any case, we've still got 10 days left in the weird, weird month of May. So, what else you got for me?

Update May 26, 2025:

Well, there was this.

You don't see one of these flying over every day, either! May can bring hot weather with high winds that create the perfect storm for wildfires. Several tankers like this one flew countless sorties all day long on May 22nd, en route to a mountain fire that threatened nearby communities. By day's end, there was no more smoke, so apparently, they got the job done. Whew!