Near ports o' call in San Pedro. I was out shooting seagulls against a fairly unique looking deck of middle height to high clouds. During this time at around 3 PM or so I noticed something twinkling as you would see stars appearing towards dusk. This of course was broad summer daylight. The object looked exactly like a star and the same size as one. It appeared to move very, very slowly and not at the same speed of the clouds above which were all moving in a wnw direction that afternoon since I was out there for well over 5 hours... This object moved in a WNW direction for about 20 minutes and then stopped and slowly ....very slowly reversed course back to where I first saw it.... After about 45 minutes I gave up looking at it. I am very familiar with the airspace above this area since I worked two sectors at LA Center above and around me that was ABOVE LA TRACON's airspace. This object appeared very high at least 12,000 to 20,000 feet... And this is just guess seeing some Long Beach jet departures...I could not better fix the altitude since I did not know the size of the object I was observing... I took several photos of it and blew them up when I got home in PhotoShop Elements....I shot in JPEG and not RAW...For reference to the cloud heights there were many Long Beach Airport departures that fly over the harbor and climb very quickly... The normal appearance of this object was bright glistening silver and had a triangular shape with something cylinder looking hanging to the bottom of it. However when I further blew it up it looked really, really weird....but it was not blurry. Neither shot appeared blurry..though I can't rule that out since I had zoomed way in... Now I cannot tell if it was a weather balloon or a metallic toy balloon. But it was definitely there and I followed it since it was nearly directly overhead. There is no way I would have seen it if had not been looking up at the seagulls I was shooting.. The meta data on the original JPEG images would give me all the camera settings and the exact time on July 18th. Again...both of the these images are blown up ....For the naked eye, the object was the size of star...not even the size of a planet.... At first I thought it was a weather balloon but when it reversed course and went back slowly to the original area I spotted it in that seemed to be a deliberate navigational maneuver.. This could have been an ultra high drone I suppose for harbor security. I had never seen anything like this and again I would have never has seen it in the first place had I not been trying to capture seagulls with the backdrop of clouds in a specific location above me. I have included some of the seagull photos as well. The original images were shot using both a Sony A6000 with a kit 18 to 50 mm lens at 24MP and then I switched to a Sony A77 II with a 28 to 200mm Tamron lens using the extra fine JPEG setting at 24mp...at 200mm this was actually like a 300mm lens on a 35mm film camera since both the A6000 and A77 II use APS-C sensors (aka DX). Both cameras had forms of image stabilization. My guess is a very high altitude drone or oddly acting weather balloon...and it was either in or above the horsetail cirrus and some lower alto cu clouds in the area... I have the original SD card with the images on it and also stored those onto a Transcend external portable HD. The images I have loaded up to this site are reduced in resolution from the original but only slightly...All the seagull shots are reduced resolution JPEGS from the original. The crazy looking object in the first image I loaded up here defies explanation except if I goofed up and this was some sort of camera shake...though it doesn't appear that way. Once more don't be fooled by the blowups....This thing was to the unaided eye, the size and appearance of a medium magnitude star. I have never used this site before so I don't know if what I have written here is appropriately done in the expected format/narrative.

Images

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