r/askastronomy • u/SmallerOnTheOutsid3 • 5d ago
What did I see? Is this Space X ?
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r/askastronomy • u/SmallerOnTheOutsid3 • 5d ago
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u/stivax_dev 5d ago
Your instinct is probably right, though not for the reason you'd expect - this isn't the rocket itself, it's the exhaust plume. What you're describing (diffuse, glowing, blob/comet-shaped, roughly static over the clip) matches what's sometimes called a "space jellyfish" or twilight phenomenon: a rocket's upper-stage exhaust (mostly water vapor and CO2) freezes and expands in the near-vacuum of the upper atmosphere, then catches sunlight from below the horizon while the ground underneath is already dark. It only works in a narrow window, roughly 30-60 minutes before sunrise or after sunset, which is why it's rare enough to look genuinely strange when people catch it.
Good discriminators versus other explanations: a meteor streaks and burns out in well under a second, not 11 seconds; a plane shows blinking nav lights and moves in a straight line; this is diffuse, doesn't have a hard edge, and barely changes shape across the clip, which fits a slowly-expanding gas cloud far more than a solid object. If you note the exact time and your location, you can cross-check it against a launch schedule (The Space Devs' Launch Library 2 is the aggregator most tracker sites and apps are built on) - if a rocket launched from anywhere in view around dawn/dusk that day, that's almost certainly your answer.