Jet? UFO? Trail with no apparent source

Originally posted by wigit
Hey OP, you need to look up more often. About 95% of the aeroplane trails I see have no planes in the picture. If you know what I mean.

But I do see why you're suspicious. Sometimes I look up and the sky is full of trails, i.e. the ones that chemtrailers complain about. (My complaint is that it's a flipping mess up there and by lunchtime there's no blue sky left to look at.)

Back to my point, a lot of the time these are trails that you spot long after the plane has vanished. I've looked up at an empty blue sky many times, then looked up again half an hour later and it's full of lines, and I've said to myself - where was the plane that did that? The answer as I said already is that the plane has moved on and left the trail behind it and sometimes also the trails have actually fallen from much higher, i.e. from a height where the plane would be a mere dot, invisible, or if hit by the sun a tiny silver ball.

Its entirely due to the atmospheric conditions.
People have been attributing the persistence of contrails to the "chemtrail conspiracy" for a couple of decades. I think there is almost zero evidence of any such conspiracy. And I remember that some contrails persist and fan out, even from way back in the 1960s. There are just a lot more jets flying around now than there were back then.

Originally posted by Trillium
Look more like a meteor then a plane contrail

Have you ever seen a long lived persistent train/trail produced by a meteor with your own two eyes?

I have, on a few occasions...

What they all had/have in common, is that within seconds after having been made, they are all wavering and distorting, and within a few tens of seconds they are zig-zagging or even look like they are looping back on themselves.

Example of a meteor's smoke train taken from the International Meteor Organization's Photographic Handbook:


The OPs photographs on the other hand, show a trail that keeps it's basic shape for quite a long time. Nothing like a meteor train/trail.

There are fundamental reasons for the difference in trail behavior - Our atmosphere is made up of different layers, each with its own wind direction/speed. Think of a cross section through an onion. Meteoroids that hit the atmosphere, not always, but usually plunge straight down through these layers, so any train/trail will quickly be pulled apart in numerous directions. At very high altitudes where meteors are visible (or the meteor meniscus as it's known), the winds are much stronger than they are close to the ground.

An aircraft flies more or less parallel to the ground, and tends to stay within the layers. Since the air within a layer tends to more or less be moving in the same direction and at the same speed, a contrail can linger, staying more or less intact for quite long periods of time, just as the OP's photographs show.

Reading on the subject:
Meteor Trains - The International Meteor Organization (PDF format)
Meteor trail/train/wake definitions

Originally posted by ragsntatters
Meteor coming through. Here's one from NZ's Stardome Obsevatory

I think you nailed it
the OP pictures looked to me , not your typical contrail they way they spiral / cork screw

Originally posted by pillock

Originally posted by ragsntatters
Meteor coming through. Here's one from NZ's Stardome Obsevatory

I think you nailed it

the OP pictures looked to me , not your typical contrail they way they spiral / cork screw

I'm not an expert, but the photo looks like an ordinary contrail to me. There is almost always some turbulence in the atmosphere and this affects how the contrail moves and spreads over time.

If there was a meteor, I'm pretty sure there would be witnesses. It has to be a pretty big meteor to leave a visible trail like that.

Originally posted by pillock
I think you nailed it

I love the way people who have obviously never seen a persistent train left by a meteor suddenly become experts on them

If it's a meteor train, then why do the photographs not show it distorting like a meteor's train/trail does over time?

Did you not read the post I made above yours or look at the links?

I guess not


Edit to add this animation of a Quadrantid meteor and it's persistent train, taken by Mike Hankey last year.

Here’s an animated sequence of about 10 frames that shows the smoke trail left by the meteor.

Photo Details
Canon 50d DSLR
25 Seconds @ ISO 800
Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 fish eye lens
Mounted Piggy Back to CGEM

So that's about 4 minutes worth of photographs in real time.

As I said - a meteor's train/trail behaves nothing like a contrail.