Flashes in the Sky and Shooting Stars

I live in North Carolina, USA and have been a sky gazer for the past few years. A few months ago I began noticing bright flashes of color in the sky. This has happened many nights in the past few months. People living with me have seen this too. These flashes of color effect the entire sky and effect the entire viewable sky. This happens on crystal clear nights as well as nights there are clouds present. The colors consist on Red, Green, and Blue so far that I have seen and the events last anywhere from one flash to many flashes over minutes in duration. In addition to these color flashes, I have seen a ton of shooting stars that seem to only ignite visibly only a few hundred feet from the ground.

I'm wondering if anyone else can confirm any of these anomalies.

Hi, I've actually seen this myself. My wife and I lived in Winter Haven (Central FL) at the time. It was about November 2008 and we would look to the West at night, on a clear or partly-cloudy night and see bright green flashes just on the horizon on any given night.

I'm not sure if this could be the case, as it seems so frequent, but back in January's ice storm in Western KY, when transformers were blowing from a distance (out of earshot) they were still lighting up the sky in red, green, blue and orange. Could this be a possible culprit?\

Probably not, but I thought I'd throw it out there, simply because I've never noticed it in my locale aside from during that storm.

It'd be interesting to figure out what it is, though! Sounds pretty...

[edit on 3-6-2009 by Heatburger]

I'm a sky gazer myself and i can confirm seeing this phenomena as well but i live in Porto Portugal.
Last Saturday we had the most warm night this year and i spent all night at the balcony with my binoculars and my laptop with heavens above page open so i can check my observations.
It happen that in 1 hour gap i hard followed 3 dim lights"satellite type" above my place,all doing the same course with like 15 minute intervals.
Nothing on the website.
I thing this is unusual,because i lost track of them all on the top of this same tree.
They seem to have slight speed and direction variation but it may be due to the atmosphere.
Again,last week i observed two shooting stars,one after the other in the same sky piece.
I'll keep looking.
Peace

Last year on a particularly gloomy early summer evening (sun not down yet) I witnessed 2 separate green balls of light. Now they were mostly obscured by clouds but clearly green in color and exploded with a sonic boom. I sort of chalked them up as weird lightning and thunder at the time but after seeing video of the Canadian meteorite, I think that I probably witnessed a couple of those. Didn't see anything in the news but we are out in the country. Thanks for the post.

I've been seeing close to the same thing here in Va...

I step out every night to feed and put my dogs away. Over the past several months I've been seeing small flashes of light that cannot be explained by a plane or an meteor. I sometimes am looking almost directly at the location that it occurs, while others it is just out of the corner of my eye. I live in the western side of the state and I have been seeing lots of satellite activity north east of my location. Which would be towards DC. Could be normal, I'm just saying I never noticed that level of action.

reply to post by Heatburger


This was the time frame I first started noticing this as well. Odd though since North Carolina is many 100's of miles from Kentucky. I remember the sky flashing red for about a 10 minute duration...I was standing at my kitchen seat and was wondering why the window was flashing a red tint. Someone else in my house said "Is that red light coming from outside?" We both went out and saw the entire sky flashing...like the flash was coming from the magnetosphere of the earth or something.

Have you guys seen something like this

Video 1 (0.39)

Video 2 (0.47)
If soit's maybe what is called ''earthquake light'' Not that
South Carolina is very earthquacky.

very similar to that but the flashes come from the whole sky at the same time, instead of in a direction.

reply to post by ExPostFacto


That's extremely interesting. I'll have to put my eyes back to the skies more often now. I've fallen out of sky gazing a bit with working myself to death trying to stay afloat!