Something Strange During 2015 Perseid Meteor Shower

Yes two nights ago which would be August 12th I saw exactly what the OP witnessed. I'm in the same region of the country just north (great lakes).

I returned to the spot I witness the flash 30-36 degrees North East


Maybe we shall see again tonight..

Okay, I put them all together in a time lapse video. They don't seem to be as obvious here as they did on the preview on my camera. I'm not sure why they would look different. Anyway you can see the meteors I caught. Some of them are planes and one of them is a satellite, but there are still a few good meteor shots. If anybody sees something they want to see the original photo of just give me the shot number and I'll post it. Also, I was going to color correct these to help alleviate the light pollution, but I decided against it.

Meteor Time Lapse

a reply to: ratcals

Ok, can you point out a specific example of what it is you're talking about? Preferably in a raw image or pair of raw images.

a reply to: Aqualung2012


Everything you just explained I saw while up in Mackinac, while camping on the water.

I must have seen over 20 meteors, but lot's of other unexplained flashes coming from the west, and north east area. I also saw what appeared to be a star move very fast from point A to point B, then just disappear.

In all the years I have been in upper Michigan during this time I have never seen anything like the last few nights. We are home now in the Detroit area, but I have no reasonable explanation for many of the things I saw.

originally posted by: ratcals
Okay, I put them all together in a time lapse video. They don't seem to be as obvious here as they did on the preview on my camera. I'm not sure why they would look different. Anyway you can see the meteors I caught. Some of them are planes and one of them is a satellite, but there are still a few good meteor shots. If anybody sees something they want to see the original photo of just give me the shot number and I'll post it. Also, I was going to color correct these to help alleviate the light pollution, but I decided against it.

Meteor Time Lapse

Your video is cool to see the meteors go streaking by and leaves me wishing my current location would let me see them too. So far the skies have not been clear enough.

I am unable to tell which points of light are in question so if you can post a time in the video and a description where to look for it, I would like to try and see it.

In any case thank you for putting this together.

EVC

Yeah, I'm going to tap out of this discussion. What I see on the camera preview is different from what I see on the computer screen. There doesn't seem to be the same amount of stars appearing and disappearing. I can only attribute this to the limited resolution of the camera's view screen as opposed to the resolution of my computer monitor. Sorry for wasting anyone's time. I was going to leave you with a picture of the Milky Way as a consolation prize, but when I upload it it doesn't appear with my other photos. Any suggestions?

I got clouded out and was not able to take a look tonight unfortunately. Will keep trying until I get a clear sky.

Peace.

a reply to: Aqualung2012

Me and my wife observed similar phenomena while watching the meteor shower. Just a bright flash in one place like a camera flash going off miles above. I put it down to tumbling objects reflecting the sun or meteors appearing to come straight down and not seeing them form any other angle.

a reply to: Aqualung2012

I saw THE SAME THING several times last night. I would look about to see where the flash came from and I sometimes found a star but mostly I would look and find the afterglow of a star that wasn't there

I had to say this.

Sorry I have been a troll for the better part of 7 years on this site. I ended up creating a user name just to post this.

I myself have seen these flashes. Thought nothing of it. Was talking to my best friend and he brought up the flashes too. We discussed it wondering what that were. Left it at that and now I am reading and sharing on this post !

Curious.

a reply to: Aqualung2012

This is quite common, and taught in Basic Aastronomy, which seems to be sorely lacking in these forums. the 'flash of light', is a streaking meteor....coming straight at you! Human perspective is often very narrow and limiting....like thinking the earth is flat.

My gf and I were up at Lake McDonald, Glacier National park this evening looking at the stars and we counted 3 seperate flashes that covered over half the sky.

originally posted by: enigma51ted
a reply to: Aqualung2012

This is quite common, and taught in Basic Aastronomy, which seems to be sorely lacking in these forums. the 'flash of light', is a streaking meteor....coming straight at you! Human perspective is often very narrow and limiting....like thinking the earth is flat.

So what we saw was actually two meteors coming at us in exactly the same spot?
Had these flashes been only once and in different spots I could accept your explanation but two flashes in exactly the same spot is a bit beyond my ability to accept. What am I missing?
What we saw was not a satellite---we know what they look like. Please re-read the OP. Plenty of folks have seen exactly the same occurrence---a flash of light followed immediately by another flash in the same location, then darkness.

originally posted by: DupontDeux

originally posted by: AceWombat04
If we can narrow down a general location, I'll try to point my telescope in the vicinity tonight or whenever it's clear and take a look. (Unless we're speculating that this phenomenon is limited to the meteor shower.)

Peace.

That would be awesome!

I have marked the spot where I saw it here:

Finally got a clear night.

So far nothing, though I did see what appeared to be a satellite of some kind passing near Mizar in the dipper constellation. (Can anyone ID it? Stellarium isn't showing me what it was.) It happened around 9:52 PM PST, and while that does line up with an international space station flyover time for my location (Bay Area CA) I can't find sky location info for it so I can't be sure if that's what it was, or if it was another satellite.

So far no flashes or weirdness though, and the satellite was moving more than fast enough to NOT be what people here have been describing. Have yet to see any stationary strobing points so far. (Or any meteors, though methinks I'm a bit late for the show on that front.)

Peace

EDIT: 2 hours later... still haven't sighted anything out of the ordinary. Good seeing for once, though. Lots of stargazing to be done. Some planes. Nice weather. At least I'm getting some nice views in if nothing else.

I think you watched an Iridium satellite flare. I watched this some years ago, and it's quite impresive.

I was in the middle of nowhere with zero light pollution just watching the stars, when I saw a light in the horizon coming to my position. I have seen a lot of satellites in the sky, but this was different, every second it passed was brighter and brighter, and when it was almost in the zenith, a flash, and seconds later THE BIG ONE. No kidding, night became day for a half second and my jaw almost dropped to the ground

Next day I did a search in google and I discovered that I was just at the right spot and the right time to see one of this Iridium flares.

a reply to: woogleuk

That's an excellent suggestion. Though, are the Persied meteors really massive enough for that to be noticed? It would have to travel a bit into the atmosphere before the compression wave would cause visible heating, due to the pressure gradient. Most meteor showers are merely fine grained material, dust and small grains, some very small pebbles.

If I'm outside at night and the sky is clear, I'm almost always looking up if I'm not busy doing anything else. I had seen these particular flashes pretty often, mostly in darker skies, and I would tend to think that satellite flares are most likely what you saw. But due to the meteor shower, you were paying special attention to the sky, and specifically looking for lights. This could also explain why they seemed so anomalous. You just haven't noticed them before.

originally posted by: Aqualung2012
I have been observing the meteor shower from Elgin, IL (a suburb of Chicago.) Each night I've noticed something odd in the sky.

What I've seen the past three nights (and twice this evening) was: A flash of light like a star suddenly appearing for a split second then blinking out. Each time this happened, I would glance over to where the flash was and within a second or two, it would flash once more in the same spot... but only once more. Two quick and seemingly stationary flashes just seconds apart, and nothing else.

These were definitely not streaks of light from typical meteors. Even with the considerable light-pollution in my area, I still saw plenty of good meteors streaking across the sky. Just this odd recurrence stuck with me. I saw it tonight around midnight... then once again just a few minutes before I decided to post this thread.

I imagine meteors can appear as a dot rather than a streak, of course... but with such precision, uncanny timing and consistency?

So I ask, is anyone else seeing this?


After a very quick Google search I have found a corroborating article from astronomyguru.com which almost perfectly matches what I saw.

Strange Light Phenomena During Perseid Meteor Shower
By James W. Ashley

(Scroll down for Phenomena 2: "Repeating Point Flash")

I'm in Ohio and I just saw something similar the other night while taking my fifteen minute break at work. I just randomly glanced up from my phone and a bright light and dark blue flashed high in the sky beyond a K-Mart across the road, the flash was circular. It was almost like something opened really really fast and shut again. Almost like movie effects, or something. By freak chance I looked up at exactly the right time, and I stood there staring at that spot, thinking it was lightning or something, for about fifteen minutes and nothing else flashed. It like popped really fast, real bright, then gone.

a reply to: Aqualung2012

Late to the thread, but has anyone mentioned this?

Source Article

My son and I were out watching last week. We're in the Washington, D.C. area. We saw some strange lights in the sky that would appear for only a split second and were moving in a fairly tight arc across a small portion of the sky directly overhead. We decided to break out my high powered 850mw green laser and flash that area in the sky. We did this for a few minutes. Then we stopped and saw the strange arcing lights a couple more times. We flashed an area pretty much overhead again with the laser. about 10-15 seconds after we turned off the laser we saw an amazing thing. A perfect circle of light about 1/4 the size of the full moon powered up. It was the most perfect disk with an amazingly even surface of light. It slowly brightened to the brightness of the full moon and about 3 seconds later it powered down. The power up and power down portion lasted about one second each. It appeared that something up there was saying "Hi". Except for meteors we saw no more unusual lights that night.