I was making a quick trip to the store tonight at 9:08pm (p.s.t) and as usual I looked up at the sky. Beautiful, cold night. There was a bright light moving east, when I saw it it was near Leo's tail. I watched for over a minute, scrutinizing it to make sure it wasn't a plane. It was a steady light with no blinking lights and it faded rather quickly toward the end of my viewing. It must have been at least Mag. 1 or greater. Brighter than nearby Saturn for sure. It was moving relatively slowly and in the last 15 seconds or so it faded, going into Earth's shadow I assume. The info below is from "Heaven's Above" and does not show a bright satellite at 9:08pm local. ISS is the closest time-wise but it's path doesn't bring it anywhere near Leo.
I found a link in another satellite related forum to a site called Real Time Satellite tracking, but it's not as easy to use as Heaven's Above and while I could find which satellites are over my house tonight, I couldn't find out how to project them into the sky to see which one this could have been.

Any help will be appreciated. Here's the Heaven's Above data for my location and I've attached the sky map with a red line showing the approximate path of what I saw.

Search Period Start: 12:00 Thursday, 12 April, 2007
Search Period End: 01:00 Friday, 13 April, 2007
Observer's Location: Visalia ( 36.3300°N, 119.2910°W)
Local Time: Pacific Daylight Time (GMT - 7:00)
Limiting magnitude: 3.5

Click on the time of max. altitude to get a star chart and other details. Satellite Starts Max. Altitude Ends
Name Mag Time Alt. Az. Time Alt. Az. Time Alt. Az.
Cosmos 1143 Rocket 3.3 19:45:59 10° SSW 19:48:58 74° WSW 19:52:08 10° N
ISS 2.4 20:39:51 10° NW 20:41:04 12° NNW 20:42:17 10° N
Lacrosse 2 3.1 21:01:43 10° N 21:06:06 41° ENE 21:06:49 39° E

Thanks in advance for any help.

One of the Iridium comsats? Those are known for producing transient bright reflections from their solar arrays.

According to Heavens Above, there wasn't an iridium flash visible from my location last night.

Iridiums also start and finish very quickly...this sounds like it was just some sat that was not listed on the H.A. database - perhaps a recent deployment or upper stage.

Doug

Zygorthian raiders?

Yep, gotta watch them Zygorths...

Doug's probably got it. There was a fair amount of launch activity over the last six weeks or so...likely a booster or fairing pieces.