Shooting stars on a height of streetlamps??

Does anyone knows if its possible to see shooting stars on a height of streetlamps? I have had three occacions at night when I've seen such thing. They have been different than usual shooting stars.

One time it was still daylight, so no stars visible. I went to sit outside...and was watching towards opposite street and it's streetlamps, and hoping to see ufos appearing...so almost then I saw a burst of orange light that flew over the streetlamp, horizontally, almost looked like it could have touched the lamp...it was fast, short light burst without typical tail of meteorite..like a small firework. I thought it was odd to see shooting star when there was still daylight, and when I hoped to see something at that direction.

Second time I was standing on a higher hill and was looking down at the pier...at then there flew a same type lightburst just over the streetlamps. I didn't see anyone sending fireworks.

Third time I was star/ufogazing at night hoping to see something...and then this type of fast orange shooting star flew over my head and I followed it with my eyes and made my neck twist....I almost freaked out because it seemed to flew so close...not like those shooting stars that are clearly upper on the atmosphere.

And one thing that doesn't exactly suit on this shooting star category was when I was stargazing, there were no clouds, I had been looking a certain spot on the sky, a star, when this star blinked off like light switch and came back again. Maybe it was just nothing..but still I find weid how it did that on the exact spot that I was looking at.

Maybe these things can fall into ufo category...don't know...do you?

reply to post by starlightbright


Well, this is odd..lol..but lets have a look. It appears that street lamps have your attention, I wish we had more in New Orleans, but we lack that luxury down here. Anyway, I do not think this is a UFO or a shooting star. But I know that on some street lamps that there are openings on the side so the lights can light up more areas. These open strips on the side can be hard to see sometimes and when the light flickers or when there is a glitch when the light begins to come on it is always an orange pulse and it usually dim. Then as it begins to heat up the light gets brighter until it is shining away. You could be seeing a pulse to the light as it starts up. You could also be seeing bugs that can reflects the light like termintes or some other bug. It could even be your eyes if you focus on a spot long enough colors start to appear out of no where. Its a number of factors that it could. But I do not think its anything UFO or space related unfortunatley. But still its interesting how it only happens around street lights, for you at least.

This question comes up quite often, and the answer is that it is possible for meteors to appear to be at very low altitude, however it's only an illusion that occurs since our eyes/brains can't judge distance well when it comes to a light source in the sky (although there may be some exceptional circumstances where this might be possible that Il'll get on to later).

We also know that the vast majority of meteors completely "burn up" (it's actually a process known as "ablation" that is responsible for the light/heat produced) at altitudes of around 80-100 km. They are usually the size of grain of sand, or perhaps rice. Brighter meteors or fireballs (a meteor that is brighter than the planet Venus), are usually a bit larger, perhaps the size of a pebble, or even a football in some cases.

Even these larger meteoroids are not very good at penetrating our atmosphere very deeply, which is a good thing since they are surprisingly common. When a meteoroid first encounters our atmosphere, it's a bit like a diver belly flopping from 100m, and that is just the "wispy" upper part of our atmosphere. Lower down, at around 40 km the atmosphere is effectively like a concrete barrier to all but the largest/hardest meteors, and these are very rare.

In perhaps 99.9999% of cases, where meteorites do make it below 40km and reach the ground, they will have ceased to be luminous for a good few minutes before reaching the ground, since the atmosphere slows them down so rapidly. In many of these cases the meteoroid is traveling so fast initially, that is simply disintegrates (most meteoroids are actually composed of quite fragile material) in a bright flash, which is what happened in at least 3 "major" events covered here on ATS in the last 6 months or so:

Massive object crashes over Edmonton, Canada
UFO - meteor like object with sonic boom above Dallas and Austin Texas!
A few meters planetoid will hit Earth

Check out the video footage, in the first two threads especially.

Getting back to the topic at hand, this page explains in a bit more detail about why meteors can appear to be closer to the ground than they actually are.

This diagram should help you visualize what is going on:


Basically, the lower down in the sky (or closer to the horizon) a meteor appears to be, the further away it probably is. In the exceptional cases where this is not the case, and a meteor is still luminous, and less than 1km away from you, unless you're within diving distance of a bunker, that would probably be the last thing you ever saw.

It's worth mentioning what happened in 1908, when what is thought to be a fragment of a comet exploded somewhere between 5 and 10 km above Tunguska, devastating an estimated 2150 square km and knocking down 80 million trees!

Related reading, that should answer all your other questions:
Seen a swift/very swift moving light (colored or white) in the sky?

Hope that answers all your questions, if not, then feel free to ask...

Happy meteor observing

[edit on 29-3-2009 by C.H.U.D.]

[edit on 29-3-2009 by starlightbright]

No...it's not just near the streetlamps, one thing went over my head. The other of these two that I happened to see near the street lights did fly over streetlamp and the other swooshed low over the harbour area that was lit by the lamps. They were definately not bugs, they were like light bursts/small fireworks...I've seen how bugs look like flying around street lamps at night. But yes, they were kinda like shooting stars...but with shorter tail, lasted shorter time and were orange yellow.

Seen a lot of pictures of the moon being below the top of streetlamps, or the sun, or even planes.
It's mostly a matter of perspective.

Unfortunately, I don't have anything to add that might clear up what you're seeing - though I have witnessed the phenomena you're describing on three separate occasions. The first two lights appeared around 2:30 - 3am. I was outside by myself and saw ball of light that looked like it might be a flare of some sort shoot right by one of the streetlights in front of my houst. I saw another one as I was driving home from work right as I pulled off of the freeway. I feel confident in saying that these lights were definitely not meteors.

I'd love to know the source of these lights. Hopefully someone in this forum can shed some light on this phenomena.

reply to post by starlightbright


TheMythLives is bang on the money! There's a very high level of probability that what you're seeing is simply light being reflected off bugs from the street light. They will even fade out as a 'shooting star' does the further they get from the light source.

I don't really understand why this thread is in Aliens and UFO's though.

IRM

[edit on 30/3/09 by InfaRedMan]

Originally posted by InfaRedMan
reply to post by starlightbright

 

TheMythLives is bang on the money! There's a very high level of probability that what you're seeing is simply light being reflected off bugs from the street light. They will even fade out as a 'shooting star' does the further they get from the light source.

I don't really understand why this thread is in Aliens and UFO's though.

IRM

[edit on 30/3/09 by InfaRedMan]

The lights I saw were about the size of a baseball and were as bright as a flare. I'd hate to have a bug with those characteristics fly into my house. Should I have said the lights attempted to abduct me? Would that have received a more thoughtful response to this thread?

I know what you mean.
I was smoking on my entrance stairs and saw one flying from my rooftop to north, at a very low altitude.
It was really fast about 100 km. i saw it flying in a very straigth line, about 10 seconds and then it just vanished in thin air.

[edit on 31-3-2009 by _Float_]

YES i too got court out thinking that i had seen a meteorite that seemed so close to the ground as like only a few hundred meters above the ground.

but thanks to the explanation of a fellow poster it was clear that it could have only have been an optical illusion,very strange effect

reply to post by starlightbright


I recently have seen the exact same thing you saw. Does this sound right, I saw one start at about 60' up and maybe travel about 50' or so at about a 30-45 degree angle and dissapear. It just pops into view and is about baseball sized (color yellow/green) with a tail length about 10 times the diameter of the ball and then go put before they hit the ground.. I saw 3 within the last 2-weeks 2 of them in the same basic spot. All of mine have been at night so far. Not at all high up in the air, zero chance. I could have hit it with a rock it was that close, no eye trickery.
It freaked me out to see them too but now I just look and say whatever.
Glad someone else has seen this other than me.

reply to post by InfaRedMan
Nope not what I saw. You would know if you saw one. We're smart enough to distingwish between bugs, lights or whatever. I was what it was I saw it 3-times zero chance of anything else zero.

Originally posted by InfaRedMan
light being reflected off bugs from the street light.

Originally posted by InfaRedMan
I don't really understand why this thread is in Aliens and UFO's though.

... So, let's say you're right.

An object, that's flying, and the OP can't identify it. AKA - a UFO.

Where do you think it should go?

reply to post by Clickfoot

I don't care where what goes. I was replying to the question asked at the top and stated my own personal expierence.

a reply to: starlightbright I have seen something similar three times now, the first time it happened in 2015. The object was as low as a four story building and lasted no longer than a second. It was like a small rocket firework dropping straight down from the sky with a white sparkling tail before it changed into what looked like a red ember from a fire it then curved upwards and disappeared. I thought was that a shooting star?. The second one looked similar but without the ember effect this happened a few months after the first one. I was just in my garden 11.Dec.2016 and it happened again it lasted slightly longer and was brighter about the height of a ten story building not miles in the sky. It's not bugs reflecting light from street lamps. If you imagine the last seconds of a sparkler dropping from the sky it would probably be similar.

a reply to: starlightbright

We're they sparkly? I saw an intelligently controlled flying reddish/orange fireball once.

I agree there because remember seeing a green meteors that seemed lower then my 5th floor flat.

Hi,
I know this post was from 9 years ago.. almost exactly to the day actually haha.. but I've been experiencing what I believe to be what your talking about. I'm from Australia and the last few weeks I have spotted an actual shooting star, large fast streak of white and blue light, which was absolutely amazing to see.. moments before it appeared not far from the position it ended in was a tiny star that's was slowly moving across the sky and would seemingly blink or go out of sight to then reappear a little bit further in a direction in the sky. after a few minutes after noticing it disappeared for about the third time and then after about 2 seconds the large shooting star appeared. I usually spend every night for an hour or so laying in my backyard stargazing and since then every night I see a number of small thin streaks of light throughout the time I'm there moving in all different directions. Some whitish some yellow. But yesterday I noticed what looked like an end of a firework or thin light flare, very bright yellow, sort of twisting across the sky for a fair distance and alot slower than the shooting star bit still quite fast and then would disappear. Didn't think too much of it until.tonjght as soon as I sat outside and got my camera out to see if I could get a lucky shot of anything special before I managed to press record a really bright thing blue white light spun across the sky but seemingly extremely close. Similar to how the yellow light had moved and reminded me of how a sparkler looks when U love it quickly in the air and the light formed patterns or words if Umove it around fast enough lol. But it's come from behind me from the direction of the street and therefore street lamps and across my roof of my house. It seemed to direct its path over the shape of my roof that's what made me feel as though it was close..

About 5 minutes later I heard a rustling along the side of my fence line where I have some garden beds bushes and one tree.. it seemed to move up towards the back fence where I was parallel to on the lawn.. all the lights were off so they wouldn't interfere with stargazing so I turned my phone torch on and couldn't see anything but the rusting stopped momentarily then continued. I walked closer and sound stopped so thought must be nothing. Went on turned on back light and stayed outside for maybe 3 hours with telescope etc. Through out the night started hearing what at first sounded like a cricket maybe.. like long ticking then a break and then ticking again on and off. If I went close to the fence it would seem to become lower and drawn out sound and slower between each tick at one point from the tree/bush on the other side of the fence where the street/road is the sound became quite loud and as I've turned my torch that way a large white butterfly type thing flew out.. no sound came with that and it was almost the size of a willy wag tail type bird but the ticking continued. This went out for the 3 hours I was out there but started to become more frequent so I started to freak myself out a bit lol because in between each ticking sound there started a sort of whimper .. sounded like a 'curious monkey' sound just one short sound at first and then as I was walking to my door the ticking got louder and almost nonstop and then at the tree closest to my door which is almost the other side of my yard to where the original sounds were there was a sequence of about 3 or four different pitches of the whimper at the same speed we would say a three syllable word. I know all that sounds absolutely crazy haha I too am shaking my head. But I did record the sounds on my phone so if I can work out how to attach it I will and just let me know what U think. Hmmmm my sanity has definitely felt questioned tonight hahaha