Strange flashing light

Sucks I live In NY, wish i could be viewing this light. Nothing freaky happens that much around here. But man hope thing don't progress any more then they are.

Sorry, bit late to this party, but...

Just tonight I saw one of these wierd, flashing high altitude lights. It's not the first time, as I've seen them off and on (no pun intended) for at least a decade. Tonight was the longest duration, better than half an hour, blinking at 7-second intervals and entirely stationary. My son lives several miles from me and confirmed it. The stars slowly shifted position as they tend to do, but this thing stayed put. Now, there's no way for it to be a geostationary satellite (as some here have postulated) since geostationary satellites are positioned strictly along the plane of the equator. It obviously can't be a fixed-wing aircraft, and pretty unlikely to be a rotorcraft of any kind at that height in the thin air. I have read just tonight that some weather balloons do have strobes, so that would be my best guess. Tonight I sent the local NWS office a letter and asked if they have data on balloon positions, and gave them my time and location of sighting.

We shall see!

I have seen this phenomena as well! It was on two separate nights about 3 months apart. Very strange.
Glad you sent a letter in aero, please update us when you get a reply.

reply to post by Starcrossd


My pleasure, and I certainly will let you know. I wonder if anyone with a night scope has caught this.

Ok, here's the answer from the NWS:



The NWS office here in Melbourne does not launch weather balloons. The USAF at Cape Canaveral is the closest weather balloon site, but they only launch them routinely in the morning (they stopped launching evening balloons shortly after the shuttle program concluded). The NWS offices at Tampa Bay, Jacksonville and Miami are the closest ones that launch morning and evening balloons (8pm/8am during EDT and 7am/7pm during EST). However, the upper atmosphere wind profile Tuesday was such that their balloons would likely not have reached Brevard County.

NWS weather balloons are launched with small lights (continuous glow, not intermittent) - so they wouldn't be flashing at a seven second interval.

So, while we can't help identify what the light was that you observed, we're quite confident that it was not a NWS weather balloon!

Scott

funny thing at about 430-5 am in southeast Pennsylvania I saw a flashing light brighter than a star traveling sw towards Delaware nj it would flash in 20-30 second intervals and it was moving fast it was too high to be a plane based on comparison of stars and tree line measures and planes don't flash like this did planes are very easy to pick out they flash white in 5 second intervals and you can see a distinct red light on them this was no plane perhaps a sattelite or something else???

I have seen these on a few occasions in the winter just gone 2013/14 and then again last night being why im posting this now (my 1st summer sighting). Watching a satellite move at a fair pace and flash randomly, probably as it tumbled, out the corner of my eye i saw another flash , i watched it flash at random for about 2 minutes in the same spot, then nothing, continued to watch the same spot for another 10 minutes but nothing else happened. Im in the UK on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border. This would have been just after midnight GMT looking slightly south east of straight up.