By Ash Ellis
It was a great turnout for our latest sky watch, this time taking place at the top of Parbold Hill, Wigan. Finally, for the first time in about 5 sky watches, we had a nice clear sky encouraging more than a dozen of our Facebook group members to brave the cold and spend a few hours in the company of like-minded people, hoping to see something unusual in the beautiful night sky.
The moon was at 70% waxing gibbous and thus quite bright making it hard to see the stars (and possibly anything else) in that part of the sky, but most of the sky was very clear and you could almost see the faint mist of the milky way above us.
Sadly, there wasn’t much going on in tonight’s clear sky. Plenty of aircraft on the regular flight paths into Liverpool airport, and a helicopter milling about near Bootle Docks, nothing unusual. However, team member Natalie did repeatably see what appeared to be a green beam of light shooting up from far on the horizon into the sky, only visible for a split second and not witnessed by anybody else quick enough to look after her exclamation from seeing it.
At the cold really started to settle in, the kettle and biscuits came out to give everybody a warm-up cup of tea or coffee to increase spirits for the remainder of the night, which resulted in just one more odd object witnessed, being a orange ball of light which passed overhead of us. It wasn’t an aircraft and appeared to be a bit too bright to be a satellite, but who knows?
