Evening of Saturday, September 19, 2009, was the guest of a friend in Pennsylvania. We were sitting around a huge bonfire. Looked up at the night sky to see an unusual sight. There was a HUGE triangle shape, smokey, white light in the night sky around eight p.m. which lasted for only a few seconds. The sky was clear with no moon nor clouds. A handful of people witnessed this unusual triangular light. None of us were able to identify what we saw. Checked an assortment of websites to see if others reported this unusual light. Discovered hundreds of people have been reporting and seeking an explanation for same sighting in sky from most states down the East coast of the U.S. from Maine to Alabama in addition to Canada and Nova Scotia. Most descriptions of sightings are similar within this time frame. Have seen meteor showers, shooting stars, Hal Bop comet, eclipses and a rocket launch from a distance, this did not resemble any of them. However, was a thrill to see something like this that I have never seen before! Other than looking up to check mountains and trees for leaves, any of you see this in the Vermont sky on the evening of September 19, 2009?
Aspen
September 19, 2009 Vermont Night Sky
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From_the_NEK
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I happened to see it too, but just the last 10 seconds of it.
From Spaceweather.com:
From Spaceweather.com:
SATURDAY NIGHT LIGHT SHOW: The phones started ringing around 7:30 pm EDT on Saturday night, Sept. 19th. All along the US Atlantic seaboard, police stations and news desks received reports of strange lights in the sky. John A. Blackwell of Exeter, New Hampshire, snapped this picture of the phenomenon:
"It was an impressive display," says Blackwell. "To the naked eye, it was visible for about a minute."
It looks like a passing comet or a giant, luminous amoeba. But this was pure rocket science. The cloud was created by a Black Brant XII sounding rocket launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The rocket released a cloud of electrically-charged aerosols near the top of Earth's atmosphere to investigate the formation of noctilucent clouds or "NLCs." Mysterious NLCs form naturally around Earth's poles during the months of northern summer. On this September evening, researchers decided to see if they could create an artificial NLC at mid-latitudes; it seems to have worked.
Ground-based cameras and radars along the Atlantic coast monitored the experiment while the STPSat-1 satellite watched from Earth orbit. Principal investigators at the Naval Research Lab hope the data will reveal much about the microphysics of noctilucent clouds and the possible role of rockets in creating them.
