I hope this is the correct forum.......

2 Stars...... I think they are Stars, anyway..... I've never seen a Star dance around like these 2 do.....

My location is SSE  of Lynnville, TN (I am at about bearing 175 degrees from Lynnville & 6 miles distant from it).
From our altitude of about 1k feet, these objects are as follows at 21:22 CST today's date........

First Star is at bearing 275 from us & about 10 degrees above the horizon at the stated time.....

Second Star is at bearing 315 from us & about 15 degrees above the horizon at the stated time.....

All 3 of us have observed (with naked eyes) both of these Stars move around up, down, left, & right
noticeably.... They are pulsing Stars as well...... 275 is Reddish & the 315 is whitish....

Any ideas?

Install the SkyMap app on your phone. It is free, and works well.

Venus and Mars .......... that's what McCartney said anyway.

Are you saying that they visibly move and pulse as you sit there watching them over the course of second/minutes/hours, or that they appear bighter/dimmer and in different locations on different nights? 🤔

Get a plansephere or install Stellarium on your computer or on your phone and try and learn your constellations. It's a useful skill.

My guess is Rigel & Aldebaran. Rigel is white, Aldebaran is redish.

Neither are going to be moving in relation to the other stars, although they will track through the sky just the way the sun and moon do.

Thanks bpm !!!

What would cause these 2 stars to seem to be jumping around like that? Is there something
between us & them that causes the light to "bend" & make it look like they are moving?

IMO, it seems almost like these 2 objects are tethered weather balloons, but they follow the
same track every night like other stars.

geosynchronous sats?

I think I found an explanation....... If these 2 stars are Red Giants, that would explain what we are seeing.

Red Giants are very massive, and their gravity is weaker on the periphery. Escaping gases shift around
the perimeter at different locations, thus causing bright flares at different points on the outside of the
Red Giant. This changes the focal center of the light that is escaping, and makes the star appear to "dance".

Neat.... Learn something new every day !!!

They are pretty low in the horizon. The light has to pass through a lot of atmosphere to get to your eyeball. I don't usually look at anything much lower than 35* with my telescope and expect to get good views. The higher in the sky, the less atmosphere.

Betelguese and Capella

Atmospheric distortion, and they are hauling ass to the horizon.  Betelgeuse is going to have one of the higher angular sweeps of any star out there, because it's roughly an East/West setting star.  Capella, slightly less so.

The North Star, Polaris, is visible in each of these photos, as the star that is roughly stationary - but you can see that it is sweeping out a very small circle, so not entirely stationary.  Move away from this point, and you are looking more east or west and the star trails become progressively longer - because they are covering more sky in the same amount of time.  Stars along the east/west plane will form straighter lines in these photographs.





In this photo you can see arcs in two directions.  With an unbent line of stars running roughly into the pass just north of Grand Teton, and I'll bet that pass is pretty much due west.  This is the Ansel Adams Overlook, so you can geolocate these features and get bearings.

The stars to the right are rotating counterclockwise around Polaris.  The stars to the left are rotating clockwise around a point that is the would-be South Star, if there was one, a point well below our horizon.



And, the "North Star" isn't always the north star.  When Columbus navigated his way over here, he did so shooting to a blank part of the sky where Polaris currently sits, today.  I think Polaris was some 10 or 15º out from that position back then, maybe something like a full handwidth at arm's reach, or something like that.

Kind of funny that we give "the North Star" a latin-based name, Polaris.  I don't think it would have been the North Star back then, either, and probably not the most prominent star circling around the pole.  We've made a transposition of a couple thousand years, here.  I think.