A trick of the light?

We finally managed to have a clear enough night to be able to see
something other than bright stars. Unfortunately, the moon has been
a bit bright, causing me difficulty in getting accustomed to the
dark enough to see the dimmer objects.

I managed to see the Great Orion Nebula, and also the Andromeda
galaxy - albeit only from the corner of my vision as it appeared so
pale (the sky was quite bright due to the light from the moon on the
atmosphere).

I was browsing around Orion and stumbled across a binary. Using the
identify function on the Autostar, it identified as Mintaka - though
I don't think it was, as the alignment was a bit off - so things
were off the top left of the view, being northeasterly of where it
should be. They were very close together, and the smaller of the two
seemed to be to the northwest of the pair. I went off to do
something and then looking back at it about 5 minutes later, the
pair seemed to be separated more than they were before. Is this
likely to be a trick of the atmostphere, or my eyes adjusting - or
are the stars orbiting at incredible speed - which I highly doubt,
as you'd never expect anything extrasolar to be that fast.

Just after I noticed that, I decided to browse a bit further and
bumped into something hurtling by in a northern direction.
Presumably a satellite of some kind. It was quite a fight to keep up
with it, and then try to overtake it. Mum wanted to see the weather
satellite that passed over earlier, but we missed it. I had to
overtake it so that I could go and get her, then have her come back
to see it pass the area that I was pointing at.
Luckily, she saw it but I lost it almost immediately after that.