[Note: I also put this in my web space - ask for the address.]Driving out of town, going for one last stop. It's about 16:50 - the sun had already set behind the mountains. Noticed a bright patch of white in the darkening sky - too big for Venus, not quite as bright. Could be a very bright small cloud, but other clouds are drifting and this one isn't. At a parking lot, I braced my binoculars solidly, and determined the object was stationary for about 1/2 hour. I asked another person to look and tell me what he saw - it was the same. The object was about 25 degrees above the southern horizon, about 4x the size of Venus, and overall brightness roughly that of Jupiter - to the naked eye. There were no clouds near it, but cirrus clouds were approaching from the west.No camera, so I memorized all I could, and later drew a picture. When I was a kid, I saw one that was all action and no detail. This was the opposite. I'm glad, because I'm tired of pictures of blobs and specks. This drawing is large (~ 1 MB) - if you zoom in, you will see my attempts to represent the following impressions. Feel free to copy the drawing; just don't alter it in any way, and don't represent it as an actual photograph. While the shape and placement of the object's features is reasonably accurate, my drawing cannot do it justice.It looked like a glowing diamond filled with countless strands of yellow-white light, each strand a string of countless beads of gleaming white, all of which floated in a transparent medium which permitted the sky color to pass through yet also glowed faintly due to its contents. It brought to mind one of those spectacular back-lit pictures of a live jellyfish by National Geographic. The brightness of the "corners" was more like that of Venus, but the interior was of lesser intensity.As the clouds began to pass #under# it, I knew it was pretty high up, pretty big, and not attached to a tether. As the clouds began to obscure it, it's light gradually changed from yellow-white to intense crimson, although the corners remained white. Therefore I thought the object might be reflective, rather than self-luminous - we get New Mexico sunsets. However, after it was obscured for a while and the sky was getting dark, the clouds thinned and the object was a faintly visible, yellow-white glow.Object made no sound.-END-

Images

‹ ›