What is that glowing white object that flew past in the video location Nanyuki Kenya

Just observed this glowing object as i was taking video of the fireworks from my balcony. Key point notice the high speed and high height it achieved way above the fireworks. And also flying in a wave like pattern before suddenly disappearing. Happened on 1st Jan 2025 around 00:01 am just after crossing to the new year
 
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It's an internal reflection within the camera optics of the bright light in the right of the frame.
Freeze a frame - find the midpoint, draw an X on your screen.
Repeat
Repeat
Repeat
All 4 'X's will be in almost exactly the same location - the middle of the screen. Deviation from the middle can be explained by image stabilisation (which effectively alters where the middle of the frame is by shifting it counter to physical motion).
 
Remember, speed, size and distance are all interrelated. Something small and close will appear to be moving much faster than something large and far away. 2 immediate possibilities that jump out at me:

First , note the relationship between the object and the bright light at the bottom. As you pan the object moves and is relative to the light:

1735748553224.png


As @FatPhil pointed out above. A possible internal reflection.

However, it's also possibly something small like a bug flitting back and forth fairly close to you. It's catching the lights as it flies back and forth. It's not higher than the fireworks, as the fireworks are out in the distance, while the bug is just past the beam visible at the top of the video. Being close, it moves fast.
 
fcmuchina said:
Just observed this glowing object as i was taking video of the fireworks from my balcony. Key point notice the high speed and high height it achieved way above the fireworks. And also flying in a wave like pattern before suddenly disappearing. Happened on 1st Jan 2025 around 00:01 am just after crossing to the new year
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I'm confused, did you see the "glowing object" in real time with the naked eye or only in the video after reviewing the video? If the former, and the video accurately portrays what you saw real-time, the internal reflection explanation is a non-starter.
 
I'm new to the forum navigating through to understand how it works very glad to be here.

I saw it in real time—even before it appeared you can see it kind of startled me the camera shook for abit. As I mentioned earlier, I was recording the fireworks when I suddenly saw it appear and started following it even my focus shifted from that of fireworks. Toward the end, you can see it moving at a higher speed than I was panning the camera. It's worth noting that it disappeared just above Mount Kenya.
 
Duke said:
I'm confused, did you see the "glowing object" in real time with the naked eye or only in the video after reviewing the video? If the former, and the video accurately portrays what you saw real-time, the internal reflection explanation is a non-starter.
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To avoid potential confusion, could one see such a reflection "with the naked eye" while looking at/in the camera viewfinder? If so (I'd assume so with an electronic viewfinder?) then it would be a three-option question -- "Did you see it in the sky with the naked eye, at the time while looking through the viewfinder, or not at all until reviewing the video?"

Just concerned lest the "through the viewfinder" view might generate a "Yes I saw it at the time" response that might not mean what we think it means.
 
jarlrmai said:
It's a destabilised sensor reflection, in phone videos there's some stabilisation going on which works for the scene, but against the sensor reflection which moves more erratically as a result.
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Ah. I saw that it moved side to side with the camera movement but wasn't sure about the jittery up and down movement. That explains it.
 
Another way to approach it is by playing the downloaded video at 0.5x speed, preferably with the sound off. Focus one eye on the ray of light from the bulb highlighted in the photo below, and the other on the object. You can observe the sudden turn and the start of its backward movement, which was unexpected and seemed somewhat self-initiated. The camera had to catch up, and the backward motion was very smooth.
 

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fcmuchina said:
You can observe the sudden turn and the start of its backward movement, which was unexpected and seemed somewhat self-initiated. The camera had to catch up, and the backward motion was very smooth.
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Which is also consistent with a small fast-moving object close by, like a bug. Humans are notoriously bad at judging distances at night without suitable references. If you read through our thread on the drones over New Jersy, this is a constant problem. People are seeing large commercial aircraft in the distance and assuming they are much closer.

The size, speed and distance of an object is interrelated. One would need to know the size of it to determine how far away it is and how fast it's moving.
 
If you watch the later part of the video, starting at 00:15, there is always a spot of reflection, that is diagonally opposite the center of the image, to the bright firework flashes in the distance.

I've ringed four of these red four in the images below.

reflection01-jpg.75385


Reflection02.jpg


Reflection03.jpg


Reflection04.jpg


If you drag the timeline slider of the video around slowly when these distant fireworks go off, you'll see them a bit more clearly that in these screenshots in isolation.

These dots of reflection are smaller than those that the OP is asking about, as they are of a smaller area of light, compared with what looks like a spotlight in the foreground, that produces the moving dot reflection. The also are less noticeable, as they only appear for an instant, when each firework explodes.
 

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Beyond reasonable doubt this is not a large distant object nor a nearby small object. It's a camera artifact.

The most likely artifact: "A destabilized sensor reflection." Which is a neologism coined by MW.

Ordinarily, I'd say that this artifact could be an example of Aperture Ghosting or Ghosting Caused by Lens Element Reflections but the deciding factor is the way the artifact moves, which is not always intuitively matched to the way the camera is moving.



You can observe the sudden turn and the start of its backward movement, which was unexpected and seemed somewhat self-initiated. The camera had to catch up, and the backward motion was very smooth.
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This "chase" was an illusion. The artifact started moving because the camera was moving. Then you started to move the camera on purpose to "catch up"with it. The more you moved the camera, the more the artifact moved. And so on.
 
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The key to this chase: This movement is called "optical ghosting drift."

The artifact appears on the opposite side of the optical axis from the original light source. The artifact is a "ghost image" of the light.

I should explain what the optical axis is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_axis
... an imaginary line that passes through the geometrical center of an optical system such as a camera lens
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The red line is the optical axis. When you look through the lens, the optical axis is a point, not a line, which I think is something that commonly confuses people. I think people are imaging a vertical line across the picture.
Optical_axis_en.png



Here the light source is near the center of the frame (vertically) and the ghost image of the light source is directly above the real light source.

101.png

So why isn't the ghost image across the optical axis?
Answer: It IS across the optical axis... Vertically. Bottom to top.

101 A.png





Here the ghost image is across the optical axis BOTH vertically and horizontally.
102.png

-The real light is on the bottom of the frame and the ghost is on the top.
-The real light is on the left of the frame and the ghost is on the right.

Across the optical axis in both cases.


This is the thing about optical ghosting drift: When the camera moves, the real light and the ghost image of the light move in opposite directions.

The camera moved right. The real light moved left in the frame, as you would expect. But the ghost image moved to the right in the frame. The ghost moves in the same direction that the camera is moving. Which is opposite to what we intuitively expect.



Now, the camera has moved to the left.
103.png

The ghost image also moves left. The farther you move the camera to the left, the more the ghost moves to the left. That's the essence of this chase.
 
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fcmuchina said:
I'm new to the forum navigating through to understand how it works very glad to be here.

I saw it in real time—even before it appeared you can see it kind of startled me the camera shook for abit. As I mentioned earlier, I was recording the fireworks when I suddenly saw it appear and started following it even my focus shifted from that of fireworks. Toward the end, you can see it moving at a higher speed than I was panning the camera. It's worth noting that it disappeared just above Mount Kenya.
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Still not clear if you saw the "glowing object" with the naked eye in real time, or if you were watching it through the camera in real time. Please clarify, did you see the object in real time with the naked eye or in real time only through the camera viewfinder? Or perhaps, both?

Also, I don't think you mentioned whether anyone else was with you on the balcony. If so, did that/those individual(s) see and/or video it as well?
 
Duke said:
Still not clear if you saw the "glowing object" with the naked eye in real time, or if you were watching it through the camera in real time. Please clarify, did you see the object in real time with the naked eye or in real time only through the camera viewfinder? Or perhaps, both?

Also, I don't think you mentioned whether anyone else was with you on the balcony. If so, did that/those individual(s) see and/or video it as well?
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I'm going to be bold here and say that they saw it through the camera, as in, on their phone's screen as it was being filmed. Even if they claim otherwise, I'll attribute that to misremembering. This is a clear-cut case of an optical artifact, most likely internal reflections of that bright light source in the lens.
 
Duke said:
Still not clear if you saw the "glowing object" with the naked eye in real time, or if you were watching it through the camera in real time. Please clarify, did you see the object in real time with the naked eye or in real time only through the camera viewfinder? Or perhaps, both?

Also, I don't think you mentioned whether anyone else was with you on the balcony. If so, did that/those individual(s) see and/or video it as well?
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Yeah, what happened was that I saw it in real life just before I started recording. Watching the video at slower speeds, you'll notice that my focus was on the fireworks in front. Then, you'll also see that after I got startled and tried locking in to catch its flow, I started panning the camera toward the direction it was going, and then it appeared in view. Also unfortunately was alone at that time at the balcony.
 
fcmuchina said:
Yeah, what happened was that I saw it in real life just before I started recording. Watching the video at slower speeds, you'll notice that my focus was on the fireworks in front. Then, you'll also see that after I got startled and tried locking in to catch its flow, I started panning the camera toward the direction it was going, and then it appeared in view. Also unfortunately was alone at that time at the balcony.
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That's not what I see in the video at all. What "my focus was on the fireworks in front" implies to me is that you were already looking at your screen before the mysterious orb appears and that's where the orb appeared. After that, it was all bugs bunny at disneyland.

Your camera *clearly* creates these internal reflections, there's one for an instant at about 1.1s into the clip, a bright glaring explosion just 7 o'clock from centre, and there's a dot opposite it that isn't in the frames before or after. It appears with the bright flash, it disappears with the bright flash - it's an internal reflection of that bright flash.

Have you captured the frames, and drawn the lines as I asked you to? Please add the above frame's example to the selection of frames you use.
 
Yes i accept i haven't l captured the frames and did a keen study on them. I must accept i am new to this trying to understand the skill better. What i can confirm is by saying i saw it with my naked eye and started following it is, that yes my focus was on the fireworks infront but also we got that peripheral vision that you can notice something when its happening from the side thats what prompted me to start panning the camera even before it came into camera view.
 
fcmuchina said:
Yes i accept i haven't l captured the frames and did a keen study on them. I must accept i am new to this trying to understand the skill better. What i can confirm is by saying i saw it with my naked eye and started following it is, that yes my focus was on the fireworks infront but also we got that peripheral vision that you can notice something when its happening from the side thats what prompted me to start panning the camera even before it came into camera view.
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You were panning the camera trying to find something else. The mysterious orb that later grabs your attention comes into view *from below the middle of the frame*, whilst you are *panning up* - panning up is trying to get away from that mysterious orb. Therefore you are not trying to follow that, you're trying to catch something else instead.
 
FatPhil said:
You were panning the camera trying to find something else. The mysterious orb that later grabs your attention comes into view *from below the middle of the frame*, whilst you are *panning up* - panning up is trying to get away from that mysterious orb. Therefore you are not trying to follow that, you're trying to catch something else instead.
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If this is the case the the *panning up* we can guess could be smooth that kind of camera shaking wouldn't have happened. Just some background was at that balcony seated for sometime way before it happened wasn't even that eager to record the fireworks at the start but was aware of the fireworks both infront and the one that were happening on the rightside. What prompted me to record was that the fireworks infront gave a better show and that thought of just get something you can remember in future. That was about a minute past midnight and had been seated there from around 11pm way before midnight.
 
The other thing I will add is that when I was recording it, I didn't even think it could be an orb. I was fascinated, thinking it was a type of firework moving too fast and standing out. It was only later, when reviewing the video, that I noticed those movements seemed kind of intelligent.
 
fcmuchina said:
The other thing I will add is that when I was recording it, I didn't even think it could be an orb. I was fascinated, thinking it was a type of firework moving too fast and standing out. It was only later, when reviewing the video, that I noticed those movements seemed kind of intelligent.
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Just a thing to remember: an "orb" is descriptive of the general spherical shape of something. A grape is an orb, an orange is an orb, a basketball is an orb. There is no such thing as an "orb as a description of a known specific entity with UFO connotations".
 
Ann K said:
Just a thing to remember: an "orb" is descriptive of the general spherical shape of something. A grape is an orb, an orange is an orb, a basketball is an orb. There is no such thing as an "orb as a description of a known specific entity with UFO connotations".
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Well noted, thank you. Without drawing any conclusions about what it was, my initial thought upon seeing the object in real life was that it was a firework, as it appeared so from a distance. However, upon later review, I became skeptical and considered that it might not have been a firework or an object I was familiar with before. Nonetheless, I appreciate the different views from members. Time will tell if it is spotted again in the future.
 
fcmuchina said:
Well noted, thank you. Without drawing any conclusions about what it was, my initial thought upon seeing the object in real life was that it was a firework, as it appeared so from a distance. However, upon later review, I became skeptical and considered that it might not have been a firework or an object I was familiar with before. Nonetheless, I appreciate the different views from members. Time will tell if it is spotted again in the future.
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Go to the same place again, at the same depth of night, and get that lamp crossing your camera's field of view again. It'll be there. It's an internal reflection, we've seen it hundreds of times before. Stop trying to fight knowledge and experience, use this as an opportunity to learn instead. Try and follow the same path twice - once slowly and once quickly - and see if the image stabilisation makes the reflection behave differently, depending on how advanced its algorithm is. Try and follow the same path twice - once where your camera and you is fairly well supported, say both elbows, or wrists, propped up against something rigid, and once where your camera is held at one arm's length - to see how much image stabilisation the camera is capable of. Experiment - test the variously available hypotheses - including your own.
 
Some illustrations.
Look at the image.
I had an animated gif, but it didn't upload correctly for some reason, I'll try to figure it out.
 

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This evening I was in a part of town that was mostly very poorly lit apart from a few very bright directional lights, and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try and capture an example of my own. Alas, my 2009 (no joke) Nokia, with its Carl Zeiss optics, was *completely unable* to reproduce the effect at all. Why do you youngsters buy such shit phones?
 
FatPhil said:
This evening I was in a part of town that was mostly very poorly lit apart from a few very bright directional lights, and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try and capture an example of my own. Alas, my 2009 (no joke) Nokia, with its Carl Zeiss optics, was *completely unable* to reproduce the effect at all. Why do you youngsters buy such shit phones?
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It could be because the (more modern) sensor itself is more sensitive, and thus the reflection is easier spotted. This is my assumption.
 
tjskep said:
well maybe it was the space junk that landed in kenya ‍https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/world/africa/kenya-space-debris-rocket.html
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No way.
The article says it happened on Monday, and also:

External Quote:
Then Mr. Mutua and his neighbors looked up and saw a large circular object slowly falling from the sky. It resembled a giant car steering wheel and glowed red as it fell, some residents said. It cooled to gray after landing in a thicket, flattening trees and bushes, according to television news footage.

And more conclusively (again): it is a lens reflection artefact. Can we please drop it now?
 
FatPhil said:
This evening I was in a part of town that was mostly very poorly lit apart from a few very bright directional lights, and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try and capture an example of my own. Alas, my 2009 (no joke) Nokia, with its Carl Zeiss optics, was *completely unable* to reproduce the effect at all. Why do you youngsters buy such shit phones?
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I know you're joking, and you don't mean to be offensive, but please note that that can be offensive, especially when you're talking to someone from a developing Country like Kenya.

He used a Samsung SM-A235F. It's not a shit phone. It's not a "top of the line" phone either. But it is not a shit phone. From my estimates, it costs about two month's worth of minimum wage in Kenya.

I don't know what brand optics Samsung has on them.
 
Gaspa said:
I know you're joking, and you don't mean to be offensive, but please note that that can be offensive, especially when you're talking to someone from a developing Country like Kenya.
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I never realised confessing to still using a 16-year-old phone, with a third of the screen real-estate, a sixth the number of pixels, a thirtieth of the RAM, a tenth of the camera resolution, not to mention a quarter the number of cameras, was such a financial flex. If that's how it works, I need to find out what car he drives, so I can compare it to my, erm, nothing.
 
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