IC 1727 with odd finding what is it??

[Peter Prendergast]

I was imaging IC 1727 tonight and in the upper left of this cropped image note that it looks like there are four pieces of something that has come apart. Ignore the entrail from a plane! What ever it was/is it was big. This is a ten minute autoguided image note the stars are perfectly round so this is NOT an artifact. One central bright white blur with two symmetric less well defined softer areas above and below and further down in front a more jagged piece. What have I got here????

[Jim McMillan]

If that was a plane that went through the frame, perhaps it is the flashing lights. I've seen similar things in my images which I've attributed to flashing lights on passing planes.

Jim

[Dick Berg]

Peter, I think this is the trail of an artificial Earth satellite - a very faint one - that is, very small. The trail ends because the satellite moved into the FOV near the end of the exposure (or vice versa left at the beginning), or it moved into (or emerged) from the Earth's shadow. The trail is wiggly either because the satellite is tumbling, though you might expect to see more variation in the intensity, or because there was atmospheric turbulence which gets integrated out of the longer exposure on the target and the stars.