A feature of the night...

It's been a long time coming, but we're finally there... the shortest day. My long nights of howling at the moon are nearly over. From here on, those long summer days can only get closer. Horray!
As you can see the photos have a nocturnal theme. The second photo is a bit dark, but click on it and it'll get all big and be much clearer to see (the wonders of electrickery). The bright 'star' on the left is Jupiter which is really easy to spot at the moment. Just right of centre is Venus. They are most obvious just as it gets dark. I can see them even from my patch of light polluted ether, so those of you in the darker areas should get spectacular view...

WHAT THE HE*!!?! IS THAT???!....

I was out in the back garden lying out on the grass, when I spotted Venus. It was daytime but it still showed up as a tiny pin prick of light. I tried to photograph it, but even at 35x it doesn't look much.

I had a go at taking some pics of a jet up at cruising height, where the sky begins to turn that darker blue.

I lay back and considered my next target, when I noticed a little black line in the sky. It was slightly curved and at first I thought it was a buzzard up high. The line shrank to a dot, and then stretched out to a line once more. It was something long, tumbling and rotating, giving the illusion of changing shape. Desperately I tried in vain to train the camera at it, but there was nothing to reference the position to. Eventually I decided to put the zoom at full optical (35x), point roughly in the right direction and perform a crude 'raster scan' of whole area. Bingo! There it was!....

To all the world it looked like a modelling balloon....

...but this was big! When I first spotted it, it had passed above the con trail of the passenger jet that I photoed at the same magnification. Logic dictates that this was as long or longer than the jet plane!

I've seen planets, meteors, glints from satellites and often seen weather balloons, but nothing like this. If it was some sort of huge wacky weather balloon where was all the equipment that normally hangs down below? The way it was tumbling wouldn't have allowed anything like that without getting tangled.

It was a real struggle keeping the thing in frame at that zoom, my arms were starting to ache.

Any movement would cause the object to skip about, so I held the shutter button firmly down with the camera clacking away taking five pictures a second!

With the SD card rapidly filling up, I switched to video downloading to the hard drive. With all the messing about with buttons, the object fell out of frame. Damn..... Oh, there it was, got it back again...relief!

Now on movie I attempted to zoom in further, 50x, 80x, 100x, 150x...No it was all too much, I just couldn't hold it steady enough.

The last three pictures were lifted from video. I was a little disappointed that the higher magnification pics didn't come out very clear, this was because I didn't have time to bump up the shutter speed to max. So these were the best that I could get.

I have absolutely no idea what this thing was. All I can say was that it did exist (I saw it with the naked eye as well as the camera), it was grey black, shiny (the sun glinted off it, but didn't shine through it), it wasn't powered (it tumbled in the direction of the prevailing wind, but slower), it had no markings and had nothing attached to it. If you know what it is then let me know, cos I'm stumped.