Paul M. Smith is a nature photographer well-known for his images of atmospheric phenomena like auroras, weather events, and sprites. He recently posted on Facebook about some strange lights he saw (and recorded on video) in the night sky while aboard a cruise ship off the coast of Hawaii. He says he saw three of the fast-moving lights (he doesn't say how long between sightings), and was able to get video of one of them, which he posted on his Facebook page. I'm an amateur astronomer with 50 years' experience, and having watched Smith's video a few times I can say that I'd have been curious about the nature of these lights too.
The stars in the video are easily identifiable and show the object traversing the constellations of the southern and southeastern sky. Over the course of the video the light covers approximately 67 degrees of sky beginning in the constellation Centaurus, passing through Norma, Scorpius, Sagittarius, and disappearing in Scutum. I measured the path of the object against the star field and timed its angular speed in the first part of the video (when the object was apparently moving more or less perpendicular to the camera) at about 6.2 degrees per second. Given this, one could calculate the straight line speed of the object, if we knew how far away it was, or how far away it was, if we knew how fast it was moving. Since we know neither, we can only say how fast it would be moving at a given distance from the camera or vice versa. My own guess as to the object's identity is that it was a quadcopter or something similar at relatively close proximity to the cruise ship. I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts. Here's a link to the video on Facebook (I couldn't find it on any other of Smith's social media outlets). https://fb.watch/lFP243BKI6/
The stars in the video are easily identifiable and show the object traversing the constellations of the southern and southeastern sky. Over the course of the video the light covers approximately 67 degrees of sky beginning in the constellation Centaurus, passing through Norma, Scorpius, Sagittarius, and disappearing in Scutum. I measured the path of the object against the star field and timed its angular speed in the first part of the video (when the object was apparently moving more or less perpendicular to the camera) at about 6.2 degrees per second. Given this, one could calculate the straight line speed of the object, if we knew how far away it was, or how far away it was, if we knew how fast it was moving. Since we know neither, we can only say how fast it would be moving at a given distance from the camera or vice versa. My own guess as to the object's identity is that it was a quadcopter or something similar at relatively close proximity to the cruise ship. I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts. Here's a link to the video on Facebook (I couldn't find it on any other of Smith's social media outlets). https://fb.watch/lFP243BKI6/
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