Deep Space UFO

I was having a nice time tonight with my wonderful Orion XT8 telescope, getting some great views of objects in the northern sky:

• Saturn (w/rings and moons)
• Castor & Pollux (binary stars!)
• Capella
• Procyon
• The Moon
• Alkaid
• A UFO

Wait. What? A UFO??

Damned if it ain't so. I was straining to get a good look at Alkaid, a star in the Big Dipper, because it was nearly at the zenith, and it's tricky to aim a big, bulky telescope at something almost directly overhead. But as I found it in the eyepiece and started to focus, a bright white light zipped across the field of view in a curved path and disappeared.

I'm a Gemini and these are my boys: Castor & Pollux.

What a bonus! As if it isn't exhilarating enough to be able to see the flipping rings of Saturn from my back yard, now I've got UFOs overhead!

It couldn't have been visible for more than a half-second, but there it was... It was in focus, so it wasn't a bug flying past the telescope's aperture. It wasn't a meteor, because its path curved. My impression in the brief moment I saw it was that it was a brilliantly-lit object zipping around in deep space: a UFO.

Me and my telescope saw something weird tonight that we can't explain. Damn, that's cool.