Thank you, Patrick! I'll contact Dan Pope and see if he will let me quote from his note in my follow-up. I am certain that lightning is the explanation now. Best wishes, Joe --- On Fri, 4/17/09, Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> wrote: From: Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] UFO BLOG To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Friday, April 17, 2009, 11:35 PM On 16 Apr 2009, at 18:41, Joe Bauman wrote:
Fun with my infamous, and undoctored "UFO" pic:
http://www.deseretnews.com/blogs/1,5322,10000034,00.html?bD=20090416
-- Thanks, Joe
I forwarded the URL to KSL meteorologist Dan Pope. Here are his thoughts, reposted with Dan's permission. patrick +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Patrick, Thanks for sharing this with me. I found it to be very, very interesting. I think I know Joe Bauman...either from reading his articles or I have talked with him personally before. I find his article to be quite accurately interesting. The object appears to me to be a cloud...possibly "blow off" from a distant thunderstorm. Remember that thunder usually doesn't travel more than 10 miles...maybe 15 miles under perfect conditions...so Joe wouldn't have necessarily heard thunder. In fact, I doubt he heard any thunder because this object is many, many miles from his location near Moab. If it is more the "blow off" or the "mushroom" part of a thunderstorm, the parent thunderstorm would probably have been over the Book Cliffs or maybe Wasatch Plateau. The cloud itself probably did not contain any of the lightning, because it was distant from the parent thunderstorm (I think anyway, but give me latitude for error). Also, we know that lightning not only hits the ground, but it flashes within the cloud and also goes cloud to cloud; but it also rises many miles up into the atmosphere in what has been dubbed "Sprites". The Shuttle astronauts took pictures of this type lightning, and it has been heavily studied since they first saw it from space. I quote from an interesting article from Psysorg.org: Sprites are one of the most common of a number of so-called mesospheric transient luminous events (TLEs) driven by lightning. Other such lightning-related phenomena include blue jets, elves and terrestrial gamma ray flashes. You can read the entire article here: http://www.physorg.com/news10961.html One of the things we know about these TLE's and Sprites is that they last for only 200 or 300 milliseconds, so the eye can't really see them very well. They are best viewed from 100 to 300 miles away, which might explain why the photograph in question has light emanating onto rather than within the object. I suspect that this was going on during the photo taking by Joe on the night of September 15, 2001. Thunderstorms are still very probable during the middle of September. It is possible to retrieve the lightning data from that night through an organization in Tuscon, Arizona that gathers the lightning strike data and distributes it to other companies for a fee. One would probably have to pay a subscription fee to see the lightning data from that particular night; to see if in fact there were lightning strikes during the time of the photographs. That might explain if lighting was present at the time, but there would be no way of measuring Sprites or other TLE's, because we only get lightning strike data from the cloud to ground strikes...not from cloud to cloud or cloud to air lightning. Sprites and TLE's would be much different than the usual lightning we see anyway. Just my observation from more of a Meteorological sense. Still, a very interesting article and picture! Best, Dan _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com