possible iridium pass or what?

Hi All,
At around 8.50 tonight (give or take a few mins) I saw a bright dazzling white Venus like light in the sky, it was about20+ degrees to the east of the sun and 10+ degrees above it, putting it in the monoceros/orion/taurus region), I cant give exact degrees as there were wispy clouds coming and going and we were in a car driving, I had to pull in and get a good look at it, I've never seen anything like it, it was much brighter then Venus, I suppose three or four times as bright as you might see Venus in a dark sky except this was in broad daylight with the sun still in the sky. The wispy cloud passed after a minute or so but the object had dissapeared, I wish we had stopped earlier to see if it was definitely moving.
My version of starrynight is having grief showing satellites so could anyone run a simulation of starrynight or something equivalent between 8.45 and 9pm tonight (remember we're using summer time so that 7.45-8 GMT).
The really mad thing about this is that the last few seconds we saw it it almost looked like 2 seperate objects, to be honest I cant explain this, other people in the car also saw this, my kingdom for a set of binoculars !!!. I thought it must have been an iridium or something, but now I don't know. There were no contrails and it didnt appear to be a plane.
Can anyone shed some light on this one ??

Sounds way too bright to be an Iridium flare if it was bright in a daylight sky. Sounds much more like a meteor/bolide fireball, which often split up into multiple pieces while they are burning up. Unfortunately I couldn't capture this on my all-sky bolide camera as it was raining here and the camera is set for maximum sensitivity from twilight onwards - the image is burned out during the day.

Phil.

BTW - How long was it visible for and how fast was it moving (roughly)?

Dave

Use Calsky and set the location you observed from. It will show Iridian flares against a star map. However it does sound too bright for a flare. the most definitive thing is the way they brighten and then fade away again, but to catch all that in a moving car would be a clever trick

www.calsky.com/cs.cgi

Clear sky
Steve

cool !!! a bolide, I hadn't thought of that, it would certainly fit what we saw.
I'll download calsky anyway to make sure.

ok, I tried calsky and it says there is no satellites there fitting the brightness we saw, so thats that.
Its pretty rare that I see something in the sky and say "what the hell is that", this was one of them, its nice to be surprised sometimes.

How long was it visible for?