What could be responsible for producing these trails ? Image Credit: YouTube / Wes Snyder Photography
Artist and photographer Wes Snyder captured a time-lapse recording of the trails while filming the night sky.
The phenomenon, which was filmed by a camera overlooking the Ocean Pursuit Shipwreck at Nags Head, appears as a series of red circular patterns in the sky to the right of the frame.
The footage shows a number of regular aircraft trails for comparison - each individual image recorded on time-lapse with a ten-second exposure and with approximately one second between them.
"I've caught thousands of plane trails and never have any of them looked like this, so I'm certain they are not your typical aircraft," Snyder told McCarthy News.
"I've caught these trails before in several other time lapses, but I have yet to figure out what kind of plane possibly has these capabilities."
"Whatever they are, they have some incredible maneuverability."
According to Snyder, the footage was recorded on September 27th between 8 and 10pm.
The phenomenon was visible in the sky for around 20 minutes.
Despite the peculiar nature of the recording, however, Snyder has not jumped straight to an extraterrestrial explanation.
"My bet is that it's military aircraft training over the Pamlico Sound," he said.
"All I want to know is, how can I get a ride in whatever it was."
Just to clarify, Earl made several posts earlier in the thread, including these 'interesting' statements of supposed fact... We asked him to provide his workings out. He seems to have forgotten this interchange, and as usual, his statements remain unsupported. And utterly WRONG, as Stereo pointed out, and I'm about to prove conclusively as part of my ongoing look in depth at the video. Now me ... I would just say 'whoops, I'm in error, I apologise and thanks for teaching me the correct way to work out actual velocities'. I'm capable of learning............
I would point out that I knew quite well about the difference between apparent speed and actual speed. I guessed about distances, and the mm of the lens (which can tell us about the angle of the view). My guesses about the numbers were wrong as we shall see. The difference between apparent and actual speeds is not wrong but a consequence of projection.
Well, I don't think that your guesses were far wrong (I haven't run the numbers yet, so honestly I don't really have a good feel for the distances yet), and of course the principles you espoused were absolutely correct (and apparently unknown to Earl). While there may be some debatable assumptions and probably large error ranges, there are a lot of helpful clues, eg: - what regional airports/military bases might be in the field of view of the original video. - what angular (apparent) velocities are actually being shown by the time lapse, and thus what actual range of velocities would result,... [More]
If the person who recorded this and intends to record it again, it would be great to have a clock positioned in the frame so that we can not only time it but see the time of day it occurs, and also a GPS location of where the camera is positioned, along with a compass bearing the camera is pointing towards. That way it would provide a lot of evidence and methods to work out what it may be to rule out more obvious things. The more data available the better. Not easy when its a random sighting but being that it was set up and recorded multiple times that makes it easier to record the data.
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