here in southern MD. Didn't keep watching it, but did see it often, when I went out and to the window. I DON'T know what it was.

Space station.

http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/view.cfm?country=United_States&region=California&city=San_Diego#.VR9LZI7W1oc

According to the locations it lists, the space station does travel around a lot, being in the NW on some nights and SW on others. And I suppose on any given night it remains stationary, in terms of the casual viewer, unless you are tracking it for hours.

There could be location reports for Maryland somewhere on the internets as well.

Plus you can only really see it for maybe an hour after sunset and an hour before sunrise.

Venus is shining especially bright in the sky this year. The cue for me was Western sky not long after sunset. The planet can be so bright at times as to fool pilots and aircraft controllers that there's a landing aircraft.

Look at the picture for April 11 on this site:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/this-weeks-sky-at-a-glance-april-3-11/

And at this page: http://earthsky.org/tonight/waxing-moon-near-the-bright-star-aldebaran-on-march-24

Right now the Pleiades are slightly north of west - Aldebaran is just to their left. Orion and the Dog Star are right in there, too. See: http://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/sirius-the-brightest-star

That gets mentioned in the first paragraph of the first website you directed me to:
From that website:
Some daily sky sights among the ever-changing Moon, planets, and stars.

Nova Sagittarii rebrightens. The nova that peaked at about magnitude 4.3 on March 21–22, then dropped to 5.9, has rebrightened to about 4.6 as of April 3rd. See article (with comparison-star chart) and up-to-date light curve. The nova is easy to observe with binoculars. Sagittarius is in the south-southeast just before the beginning of dawn. (Dawn begins about an hour and a half before your local sunrise time).
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Of course, this would mean the nova travels across the sky, so that in some six or seven hours, it can be exactly opposite where I see it??

Venus would have set by that time; Saturn would have just risen in the East. Jupiter would set around 4 AM, so at midnight it would be ~60 degrees (15 degrees/hour) above the western horizon.

http://www.almanac.com/sun/rise/CA/San%20Francisco/2015-04-02

I used Google Earth to look at the night sky over Sacramento. While the version I have doesn't identify the celestial objects, I recognized the Pleiades and Orion so went to see what is near them right now. The sites I pointed to gave the best info I could find quickly.

I used to have a night sky program that I could set to any place on earth then to any date and time. I wish I had a good one now, but I suspect the best ones are designed for mobile devices rather than desktop computers!

Possibility

Sirius would be west/southwest at that time of night.

It's definitely not the space station. That is not very bright, and also small, and FAST!

It's called Star Chart. If you have a smart phone with this app installed you just view that portion of the sky and it will tell you what is there.

You need a telescope to see the shape, though

I had known of the existence of Venus but before that sighting I had never identified it in the sky. It was quite a scene!

so not obstructed) and seeing a remarkably bright light source/star. It was still night/dark but I think it was relatively close to sunrise WHAT IS THAT? Yeah it could have definitely been mistaken for a UFO.

Later after some thought/research, yeah it must have been Venus.

Northern California

Download Stellarium from stellarium.org (or wherever they tell you to go) and you have an easy, yet quite powerful, astronomy program. There's stuff out there for smartphones, but some take up a lot of memory and can be tough to read.

Anyway, I set Stellarium for San Francisco at 11:50PM and it showed Venus right there a little down and to the right of Aldebaran.

Venus in it's full glory has been scaring the crap out of people for millennia. Nowadays, very few people look up at night (or during the day, for that matter) but when I've pointed it out the reaction is universally shock and awe.

If your location is set correctly, you can just point it at the sky and it shows a current map of that area.

even though you probably have your phone handier than your PC most of the time, you're still looking at a tiny little screen. And with Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel and other software you don't have to be online at the time.

Although for me the bright object looks to be on the horizon, the fact is that my horizon is framed by Mt Konocti - which is quite a bit above the horizon.

So since Venus sets in the West around 11 Pm, and since the object I am viewing is appearing no where near the real horizon, as it is appearing to be above Konocti itself, (Altitude of Mt Konocti is around 4,200 feet) I keep thinking maybe it was the space station?

Posted - that Venus sets at 11Pm.