Starting on the evening of Feb. 2. 2012, I observed a brighter than normal light in the north sky from our back yard at approximately 8 – 9PM, which so exceeded the brightness of all other stars visible that it caught my interest and I brought out my Nikon digital camera and tripod to photograph it. Upon focusing in, there appeared a glowing sphere on top of an upright oval shape which also glowed a golden color, with the sphere slightly offset to the right of the upright oval shape, similar to an icon of a person, if you will.. Hence, two apparent objects very close to one another or connected in some manner. I was surprised to discover the dual nature of the object and how they each had distinctly different shapes, yet appeared to glow the same golden color. There were multiple witnesses to this event in my backyard at the time and we all saw the object(s) and thought it quite unusual as this was not commonly seen at this time of night or in that region of sky, nor have I ever seen anything of comparable brightness to it in the night sky near my home. My wife and I discussed this and said amongst ourselves “..this could be a satellite or some other type of object but it doesn’t appear to be any type of star weve ever seen.” I resolved to attempt to study this object further and see if it might reappear the following night.
If so, would that indicate it is a natural object or is in a fixed orbit at that precise location? I took 6 photographs on 2/2, then attempted to repeat the observations on 2/3 and did indeed see the object in the night sky in the same relative location, although this particular night, the object displayed different colors; I took 3 pictures on the evening of 2/3/12. The sphere was glowing white and the base (upright oval portion) was dark blue in color. My camera is a Nikon D60 10MP with 200mm zoom in manual mode. 5-second and 8-second exposures were done on a tripod with a timer so no possible bumping of the camera or jitter could be induced into the image.
