Flash of light in the sky

Just after 5 AM today I saw a flash of light in the nightsky when I looked through the window of my room. It looked like a pretty light star suddenly appeared and disappeared in a matter of a second.

I immediately thought it to be notable because, even as someone who likes to observe meteorites, I don’t quite remember seeing this. It’s just a flash of light, but every time I see a flash of light in the night sky it is either an airplane (multiple recurring flashes and usually quite obvious), iridium flares (which last more than this flash lasted, which was practically a blink of an eye) or meteorites which leave a trail and also last longer.

And I don’t recall myself being prone to hallucination either. I saw it!

So it seems anomalous. I should scour the astronomy related sites later to see if maybe I saw something others have noticed. Perhaps I witnessed a distant supernova explosion? :) That’d be cool.

In any case I love seeing something unusual in the sky, for some reason, even if it is a mere anomalous flash of light. It makes the universe feel more real and exciting, as it should.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 5:29 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through this RSS 2.0 feed. You're welcome to leave a response, or a trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Flash of light in the sky”

  1. Maybe this little chunk of interstellar rubble? -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_TC3

  2. I was look9ng up at 5.03 am oct 11 and saw the same thing i looked on the internet to see if anyone saw this and found you, so being 5 days apart id be curious to find out what part of the sky you were looking at.

  3. Sorry Dennis for not bringing your post out of the spam filter earlier. I’ve been working a lot more on a new project and haven’t been checking the blog as much.

    But what you linked could be it except the timing is a little off. I wrote the above a little after I saw it and it was October 6, and the wikipedia page says October 7. Maybe it’s an error on wikipedia as here they posted about it on October 6: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/06/incoming-2/

    Gonna look for more info later. Maybe it is a meteorite after all, but falling directly into view so it looked like a flash instead of a trail..

  4. Brian and Natalie Says:

    January 21st, 2009 at 8:34 am

    Next time you see this Flashing white light, I’d like you to try the following, Get a High Powered Flashlight, and flash it at the object in question. See what happens. Natalie and I stayed up one night till the wee hours of the morning and you wouldn’t beleive me if I told you what came out of the sky. Get back to me please at: cdntrucker46@hotmail.com

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