Unusual Trail - Barnard 86

A friend of mine was imaging Barnard 86 on Aug 5th. In one of his 2 min subframes, he captured an unusual trail in the corner of the frame. I took some liberties with the mystery trail photo in hopes of characterizing and identifying what it might be. I cropped the original frame to the area of concern and resized/enhanced and made a duplicate negative image of the same photo and pasted them side by side for comparison. I took the new side by side image and duplicated it once more and then used various photoshop filters to enhance the trail. The filter that was the most effective was the emboss filter. Embossing brought out a distinct braided/rotation effect seen in the image. The final image shows the positive/negative trail image and the embossed versions on the same image for comparison. At this point after playing with the image, I can only surmise that he may have captured an ionization trail of a meteor passing through image subframe. I backtracked through time using Luminous for Mac star mapping program in the area of Barnard 86 to see if a satellite might have passed through at the time of his image capture. None were apparent, so I think that rules out a satellite. The characteristics of the trail also rule out an aircraft. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what it might be?

Attached Image:

More capture info would help (efl, field scale, etc.) Contrails commonly volute like that. Small orbital frags are also common and would not be in public domain. I've been using Night Vision on my 16-inch binos lately; the meteors and space junk scooting by are prolific. Like one piece of something every few minutes thru a half-degree field!

I enjoyed collecting "artifacts" 5 min f/2 exposures. Used to have my "roof-cam" running for a year and a half all night every night FLI 6803 with a 24mm lens looking straight up thru a good optical window. Planes, satellites, Iridium flashes, cosmic rays, aurorae, fireflies, meteors, one sat fuel dump (?!), comet pieces (!) and (alas) NO UFOs. What we always are hoping for with this survey stuff is something astronomical, unpredicted and transient! Problem is getting around to sifting thru the copious data. I'm hoping to resurrect that cam again with a 100mm f/2 but my wife doesn't want me to put it on the roof of our new house - DRAT! Some auto-sort software would help a lot. PS geosync sats are fascinating because they are rather dim and move about 15 arc-sec per sec ralative to the stars. Tom