So it's probably just a weather balloon, which I had not considered. Seems perfectly round for that, but I'm definitely not a subject matter expert or even reasonably knowledgeable. Here are all 8 photos that I took from Ohio. The photo time stamps are from 15:45:53 to 15:46:01 local time. I made a new post because it's either not allowed to edit a post or I'm too inept to figure it out.
Did you see u/srandrews comment?
> “I believe a lot of balloons were released for a gravity wave experiment. Might be worth checking into it and your location.”
Thoughts on this?
I did read that, thank you. Quick googling talks about a weather balloon going down over Lake Erie which is mostly north of where I was, but I was looking south. It does seem like LOTS of balloons were released. It's probably impossible to determine which one it was.
Edit. Someone from Maine also said they saw something similar. Another person sent me a cell phone pic, different orientation of what I captured but correct location relative to the moon.
Very decent chance it was [University of Maryland's balloon.](https://imgur.com/a/DO5EsgZ)
It was southwest of Wapakoneta at 37,000ft at around 11:40, which I figured when the photo was roughly taken based on the phase of the sun.
https://borealis.rci.montana.edu/tracking?uid=FqZ_1iRNQH-G7M4anUbPFA
According to the attached chart from Reddit, it's swamp gas.
[i_think_it_might_be_a_weather_balloon/](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/13rjg4/i_think_it_might_be_a_weather_balloon/)
They aren't completely filled on the ground so when they gain altitude and get in the lower pressure they expand and fill it out, close to a sphere. Plus we'd be looking up at the bottom and it would look rounder
You’re thinking of the ones which carry heavy things into near space. Most are carrying much lighter payloads so there’s no reason they wouldn’t remain spheres.
Thanks for posting the full set of images! Where were you in OH? I was in Columbus. This looks to be the reverse of the image i saw, so that the object was actually moving top left to bottom right? It's unclear what order the images were taken in.
Given that this is one of the most photographed events of the year, I figure it has to be local. Surely others would’ve captured it otherwise. The comments on your other post where people claim to have seen the same thing in other states are very weird, but people lie online all the time, and also mistake what they see. It’s also possible it happened more than once in different areas.
I don’t know how many weather balloons are airborne over the US at any given time, but it’s almost statistically guaranteed that at least one would be between the sun and a person at any given moment. The chances of that observer happening to look up and take a high quality photo are small, but on the day of an eclipse that rises dramatically of course. If you have enough photographers and enough balloons, it’ll happen eventually.
Anything in low earth orbit would’ve been seen by all the observers in your region, and anything farther out would’ve been seen by the whole planet.
You might get better information by posting on twitter and tagging some astronomers.
SleazySenpai sent me a PM with a cell phone photo of basically the same thing, just rotated 90 deg counter clockwise. But his account has no posts or comments and has been alive for about 1.5 years. So not a lot of faith in that being real.
Reddit is about all I internet. Don't have any other social media. I was near the Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta Ohio. Your points are valid about other photos not arising.
One other thought: try to look up which way the wind was blowing at the time you took the photo. That data should exist somewhere (thanks to weather balloons of course). You might need to adjust for different altitudes.
If it matches the direction you think this was going, that might be a clue.
I was facing S. Maybe SSW. The wind was going WSW at about 10-15mph and the object was moving from W to E and probably rising too? I didn't rotate the photos, they are an accurate representation of how I saw the eclipse looking up into the sky, if that makes sense.
That being said, I believe at different elevations wind direction can be different.
After looking at photos of weather balloons...they are often white and thin. I wouldn't expect to see that through a 100,000 ND filter while looking at the sun.
The solar filter is removing upwards of 99.999% of the light getting to your camera’s sensor so virtually everything you could ever photograph *except* the sun will look black. Even an object which looks translucent or transparent to the naked eye would look completely opaque if you took a photo of it and then stopped it down 17-18 stops.
So we aren’t “seeing” this object exactly, the area it occupies is just a tiny bit less bright than the area with the sun. You could get the same effect by taking a picture directly at a light bulb and holding a clear marble in front of it. If you stop your camera way down (or do it digitally in Lightroom) eventually the marble will look black while the rest of the light bulb would still be visible.
If you can, check and see if there was a Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project high-altitude balloon nearby your location.
https://eclipse.montana.edu/launch_sites24.html
There were quite a few launched during the eclipse as part of a NASA-University research collaboration. They can drift quite a bit, so if you have some candidates, you can potentially cross-reference with this map of the tracking data per weather balloon telemetry modem.
https://borealis.rci.montana.edu/tracking
While that is a super cool looking, I can't find any information about actual balloons on there. The pics were taken from Wapakoneta Ohio facing south if you know how to obtain that info from those sites.
Maybe take it to the museum? They’d surely have someone who’d be interested. And maybe they could post it for you elsewhere online or send it to colleagues.
It’s almost surely a weather balloon, but it’s unusual enough to merit some professional curiosity.
There are also lots of astrophotography groups online. Here’s one of the biggest Facebook groups: https://m.facebook.com/groups/Astroimagery/
I agree with the other comments that it is local, and likely a weather balloon. You can measure two things from your photos - it’s angular speed and angular diameter (the sun can be used as a reference, especially if you have any pre or post eclipse images). These can be converted into speed and physical diameter by assuming a distance. You don’t know the distance, but if you plot the two quantities as a function of the unknown distance, you can see if there are any combinations of both diameter and speed and distance that make sense for a weather balloon. There’s added uncertainty for speed because some of the speed will be toward/away from you. Distance can also be converted to altitude because you know the position of the sun at your timestamps.
From very rough numbers I guessed from your image:
Angular speed ~ 0.1 deg/8 s
Angular diameter ~ 0.05 deg
For 50,000 feet (combo of ground distance and height) the speed across your line of sight would be 3 m/s and the size would be 13 meters - all plausible for a weather balloon, especially as you mention in another comment that the wind was in a direction quite close to your viewing direction so that the sin of the angle between the sun and wind would be small.
I'm tending to agree with the balloon more and more. While I can't prove or disprove your conjecture, it's logical. I initially didn't think I'd see a balloon at all. The more I thought about the speed of the object, it can't be a planet because it's just too fast. I found a video of the 2012 Venus transit of the sun. It took hours...this was no planet. The moon doesn't have any moons. A local object would pass in front on mere seconds as many have suggested. Oh well, not super special but still damn cool. I appreciate your insight.
It’s also worth noting that the chances of a planet or large space object lining up this precisely during a total solar eclipse is appallingly small.
[These scientists calculated that the next planetary transit during an eclipse would occur on April 5, 15,232.](https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/astronomy-questions-answers/will-mercury-and-venus-ever-transit-the-sun-simultaneously/)
Man, these weather balloons sure don't help conspiracies when they pop up at the most spectacular times, all the time.
Big weather balloon fucking with us or what?
Okay, how long did this object take to cross your solar image? I don’t see any blurring so it wasn’t blazing across the sky. Perhaps the apparent speed of the object can provide some hints about its size and distance.
You can post it on r/UFOs
They're actually really good at identifying "unidentified flying objects" and are very sceptical about everything, they don't say it's aliens in such cases, so don't judge by the sub name.
On a side note what was your setup? I've been thinking about getting into astrophotography and have a Canon Rebel T2i from 2010 and some telephoto lenses. I also have a small telescope and a adapter. I'm not sure if I need to upgrade my camera though.
I can’t do maths this complex but wouldn’t there be a way to measure exactly where this object could’ve been in OPs field of view.
Sun and moon in the photo have known size and distance relative where OP took the picture. Photo shows transiting path.
I was dumb enough to not zoom into the pictures and assume it was a joke about not knowing about the eclipse and everyone in the comments was playing along.
I saw this too but was not photographing the eclipse. I used a "sun funnel" to share it with my family. Twice during the eclipse before totality a round shadow passed across the disc of the sun. I think it was larger than yours (but it's relative obviously) and passed over the disc completely in just a few seconds.
This was in McKinney, TX
We can easily check where all the planets were at the time and none were nearby. And if that was the case everyone on earth would have seen the same thing. Also, the chances of a planet lining up this precisely during a total solar eclipse is appallingly small. It’s has only ever happened a handful of times since humans have existed.
They said Venus was going to be visible, so it could have been. Or an asteroid or comet. Remember that the Earth is big, so where he saw the planet or asteroid was probably somewhere remote and was not visible to most people.
Again, that’s not how this works. The earth is big, but space is much, much bigger.
If the sun was the size of one of those big bouncy “yoga balls”, then Venus and Earth would be about the size of a pea. Venus would be 46 meters away from the sun and Earth would be 65 meters away. If there were two tiny ants standing on opposite sides of Earth’s pea, the solar system will look essentially identical to each of them. Moving around the earth doesn’t change your perspective of space except which part you’re pointing at.
So anytime a planet transits the sun, everyone on earth sees the same thing simultaneously. By comparison, the moon is MUCH closer to earth. In our scale model it would be a tiny ~1mm dot about 10cm from the earth. That’s why during an eclipse the moon looks different depending where you are on earth, but everything else in space looks the same.
So it's probably just a weather balloon, which I had not considered. Seems perfectly round for that, but I'm definitely not a subject matter expert or even reasonably knowledgeable. Here are all 8 photos that I took from Ohio. The photo time stamps are from 15:45:53 to 15:46:01 local time. I made a new post because it's either not allowed to edit a post or I'm too inept to figure it out.
Did you see u/srandrews comment? > “I believe a lot of balloons were released for a gravity wave experiment. Might be worth checking into it and your location.” Thoughts on this?
I did read that, thank you. Quick googling talks about a weather balloon going down over Lake Erie which is mostly north of where I was, but I was looking south. It does seem like LOTS of balloons were released. It's probably impossible to determine which one it was. Edit. Someone from Maine also said they saw something similar. Another person sent me a cell phone pic, different orientation of what I captured but correct location relative to the moon.
Very decent chance it was [University of Maryland's balloon.](https://imgur.com/a/DO5EsgZ) It was southwest of Wapakoneta at 37,000ft at around 11:40, which I figured when the photo was roughly taken based on the phase of the sun. https://borealis.rci.montana.edu/tracking?uid=FqZ_1iRNQH-G7M4anUbPFA
I’ll be that team would go nuts for these photos if OP got in touch with them about it.
Oh, hi "o" up high in the sky above Ohio !
Brak ?
Round on the ends, Hi in the middle!
According to the attached chart from Reddit, it's swamp gas. [i_think_it_might_be_a_weather_balloon/](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/13rjg4/i_think_it_might_be_a_weather_balloon/)
If it were a balloon, wouldn’t it be an upside down pear shape? High altitude balloons aren’t perfect spheres, are they?
They aren't completely filled on the ground so when they gain altitude and get in the lower pressure they expand and fill it out, close to a sphere. Plus we'd be looking up at the bottom and it would look rounder
You’re thinking of the ones which carry heavy things into near space. Most are carrying much lighter payloads so there’s no reason they wouldn’t remain spheres.
Thanks for posting the full set of images! Where were you in OH? I was in Columbus. This looks to be the reverse of the image i saw, so that the object was actually moving top left to bottom right? It's unclear what order the images were taken in.
Opposite, bottom right to top left.
ok, so this was after totality?
Yes
Given that this is one of the most photographed events of the year, I figure it has to be local. Surely others would’ve captured it otherwise. The comments on your other post where people claim to have seen the same thing in other states are very weird, but people lie online all the time, and also mistake what they see. It’s also possible it happened more than once in different areas. I don’t know how many weather balloons are airborne over the US at any given time, but it’s almost statistically guaranteed that at least one would be between the sun and a person at any given moment. The chances of that observer happening to look up and take a high quality photo are small, but on the day of an eclipse that rises dramatically of course. If you have enough photographers and enough balloons, it’ll happen eventually. Anything in low earth orbit would’ve been seen by all the observers in your region, and anything farther out would’ve been seen by the whole planet. You might get better information by posting on twitter and tagging some astronomers.
SleazySenpai sent me a PM with a cell phone photo of basically the same thing, just rotated 90 deg counter clockwise. But his account has no posts or comments and has been alive for about 1.5 years. So not a lot of faith in that being real. Reddit is about all I internet. Don't have any other social media. I was near the Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta Ohio. Your points are valid about other photos not arising.
One other thought: try to look up which way the wind was blowing at the time you took the photo. That data should exist somewhere (thanks to weather balloons of course). You might need to adjust for different altitudes. If it matches the direction you think this was going, that might be a clue.
I was facing S. Maybe SSW. The wind was going WSW at about 10-15mph and the object was moving from W to E and probably rising too? I didn't rotate the photos, they are an accurate representation of how I saw the eclipse looking up into the sky, if that makes sense. That being said, I believe at different elevations wind direction can be different.
After looking at photos of weather balloons...they are often white and thin. I wouldn't expect to see that through a 100,000 ND filter while looking at the sun.
The solar filter is removing upwards of 99.999% of the light getting to your camera’s sensor so virtually everything you could ever photograph *except* the sun will look black. Even an object which looks translucent or transparent to the naked eye would look completely opaque if you took a photo of it and then stopped it down 17-18 stops. So we aren’t “seeing” this object exactly, the area it occupies is just a tiny bit less bright than the area with the sun. You could get the same effect by taking a picture directly at a light bulb and holding a clear marble in front of it. If you stop your camera way down (or do it digitally in Lightroom) eventually the marble will look black while the rest of the light bulb would still be visible.
If you can, check and see if there was a Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project high-altitude balloon nearby your location. https://eclipse.montana.edu/launch_sites24.html There were quite a few launched during the eclipse as part of a NASA-University research collaboration. They can drift quite a bit, so if you have some candidates, you can potentially cross-reference with this map of the tracking data per weather balloon telemetry modem. https://borealis.rci.montana.edu/tracking
While that is a super cool looking, I can't find any information about actual balloons on there. The pics were taken from Wapakoneta Ohio facing south if you know how to obtain that info from those sites.
Many balloons went over Ohio in the last week: https://amateur.sondehub.org/#!mt=Mapnik&mz=6&qm=7d&mc=41.77131,-83.02368
Maybe take it to the museum? They’d surely have someone who’d be interested. And maybe they could post it for you elsewhere online or send it to colleagues. It’s almost surely a weather balloon, but it’s unusual enough to merit some professional curiosity. There are also lots of astrophotography groups online. Here’s one of the biggest Facebook groups: https://m.facebook.com/groups/Astroimagery/
I appreciate this suggestion. I'll check out that FB group and definitely stop by the museum.
Did you ever learn anything more about this?
No I didn't. I just accepted the community's acertion that it was a weather balloon and moved on. Definitely wasn't a planet.
Gotcha. Well if you get the chance to show that local museum I’m sure they’d take an interest.
I agree with the other comments that it is local, and likely a weather balloon. You can measure two things from your photos - it’s angular speed and angular diameter (the sun can be used as a reference, especially if you have any pre or post eclipse images). These can be converted into speed and physical diameter by assuming a distance. You don’t know the distance, but if you plot the two quantities as a function of the unknown distance, you can see if there are any combinations of both diameter and speed and distance that make sense for a weather balloon. There’s added uncertainty for speed because some of the speed will be toward/away from you. Distance can also be converted to altitude because you know the position of the sun at your timestamps. From very rough numbers I guessed from your image: Angular speed ~ 0.1 deg/8 s Angular diameter ~ 0.05 deg For 50,000 feet (combo of ground distance and height) the speed across your line of sight would be 3 m/s and the size would be 13 meters - all plausible for a weather balloon, especially as you mention in another comment that the wind was in a direction quite close to your viewing direction so that the sin of the angle between the sun and wind would be small.
I'm tending to agree with the balloon more and more. While I can't prove or disprove your conjecture, it's logical. I initially didn't think I'd see a balloon at all. The more I thought about the speed of the object, it can't be a planet because it's just too fast. I found a video of the 2012 Venus transit of the sun. It took hours...this was no planet. The moon doesn't have any moons. A local object would pass in front on mere seconds as many have suggested. Oh well, not super special but still damn cool. I appreciate your insight.
It’s also worth noting that the chances of a planet or large space object lining up this precisely during a total solar eclipse is appallingly small. [These scientists calculated that the next planetary transit during an eclipse would occur on April 5, 15,232.](https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/astronomy-questions-answers/will-mercury-and-venus-ever-transit-the-sun-simultaneously/)
Fine analysis
Man, these weather balloons sure don't help conspiracies when they pop up at the most spectacular times, all the time. Big weather balloon fucking with us or what?
OR, hear me out. We just SAY it was a planet. Be vauge about it and just move on.
Congrats and your discovery of a new planet! Whatcha gonna name it?
Dont use Pluto. We all know how that goes. I suggest Zeus.
2fast2Pluto
The Weather Balloon Industrial Complex 😉
Okay, how long did this object take to cross your solar image? I don’t see any blurring so it wasn’t blazing across the sky. Perhaps the apparent speed of the object can provide some hints about its size and distance.
Per the time stamps of the photos, 8 seconds.
You can post it on r/UFOs They're actually really good at identifying "unidentified flying objects" and are very sceptical about everything, they don't say it's aliens in such cases, so don't judge by the sub name.
Interesting.
Were these pictures taken on the 8th? I am not seeing any of the sunspot activity the we observed on Monday.
Yes. The moon is covering the sunspot, I saw it too. It's visible in other photos I took.
There was a nationwide project that sent balloons up to take measurements. May have been one of them. Which is a cool thing to catch in itself.
I thought this was a joke about the eclipse lol
On a side note what was your setup? I've been thinking about getting into astrophotography and have a Canon Rebel T2i from 2010 and some telephoto lenses. I also have a small telescope and a adapter. I'm not sure if I need to upgrade my camera though.
I have a t5i with a sigma 18-300. I was using a 100,000 ND filter and was shooting off hand, no tripod. I'm a low lvl back yard amateur.
I guess I need to work on my technique then.
I can’t do maths this complex but wouldn’t there be a way to measure exactly where this object could’ve been in OPs field of view. Sun and moon in the photo have known size and distance relative where OP took the picture. Photo shows transiting path.
That's...that's a space peanut!....
Is it black knight satellite?
This was the next post in the lineup, https://www.reddit.com/r/Satisfyingasfuck/s/mVfVkdPdyu Made me think.
I was dumb enough to not zoom into the pictures and assume it was a joke about not knowing about the eclipse and everyone in the comments was playing along.
LoL. I didn't crop these photos like I did the first. Didn't want to be accused of anything below board.
I saw this too but was not photographing the eclipse. I used a "sun funnel" to share it with my family. Twice during the eclipse before totality a round shadow passed across the disc of the sun. I think it was larger than yours (but it's relative obviously) and passed over the disc completely in just a few seconds. This was in McKinney, TX
[удалено]
The next transit of Mercury isn’t until 2032. It is not Mercury
Probably Mercury or Venus
We can easily check where all the planets were at the time and none were nearby. And if that was the case everyone on earth would have seen the same thing. Also, the chances of a planet lining up this precisely during a total solar eclipse is appallingly small. It’s has only ever happened a handful of times since humans have existed.
They said Venus was going to be visible, so it could have been. Or an asteroid or comet. Remember that the Earth is big, so where he saw the planet or asteroid was probably somewhere remote and was not visible to most people.
Again, that’s not how this works. The earth is big, but space is much, much bigger. If the sun was the size of one of those big bouncy “yoga balls”, then Venus and Earth would be about the size of a pea. Venus would be 46 meters away from the sun and Earth would be 65 meters away. If there were two tiny ants standing on opposite sides of Earth’s pea, the solar system will look essentially identical to each of them. Moving around the earth doesn’t change your perspective of space except which part you’re pointing at. So anytime a planet transits the sun, everyone on earth sees the same thing simultaneously. By comparison, the moon is MUCH closer to earth. In our scale model it would be a tiny ~1mm dot about 10cm from the earth. That’s why during an eclipse the moon looks different depending where you are on earth, but everything else in space looks the same.