THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE notSTATIONary.....

With all this clement weather we are having, and therefore clear night skies, I actually managed to spot the International Space Station. Look, I even got a photo. What do you mean you can't see it?
Hang on, I'll zoom in a bit. See? Yes I know there's a lot of motion blur. I had to use a long shutter, and what with it being over 240 miles up in the sky and travelling at over 17,000 miles per hour there was a bit of unwanted movement.
Here's some video I snatched. It wasn't really darting about like this, but scribing a horizontal path. It was only visible for a few seconds, not surprising as it manages an orbit in 91 minutes!
OK, I've enhanced the video, now you can see it properly. I'm going to have to try and get some better footage. I'm sure with a little more zoom and a very steady hand you would be able to make out some detail. The problem is it's not visible for long enough to get yourself set up. Maybe next time, in another 91 minutes....

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.