‘Super Weird’: Mysterious Object Explained in Calgary Sky – Calgary | Globalnews.ca

Calgarians looked up at the sky on Saturday to see something quite mysterious, but one man solved the mystery and identified the object as a plane soaring through the night.

Karina MacConnell was at her home in Radisson Heights on Saturday night when she observed something strange in the sky.

“I noticed something in the sky and I looked up and we started filming because I didn’t know what it was,” MacConnell said. “It was pretty slow to become a meteor in my opinion, but it definitely looked like it.”

MacConnell captured the mysterious object as it moved across the sky.

“[It was]super weird, definitely not something you normally see,” she said.

And MacConnell wasn’t the only one looking up at the sky Saturday night, several other people also described seeing the “bright object.”

Julian Redwood-Henry also captured video of the sky – and the illuminated object – from his home in Thorncliffe.

“The sun had just set and there was a lot of smoke in the atmosphere,” said Robyn Foret, former president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. He happened to have his telescope out on Saturday night and saw the object go by.

Foret said what appeared to be a fireball is actually an airplane surrounded by smoke from wildfires.

“The sun was setting and an airplane flew overhead and the setting sun illuminated the contrail in a very unusual way,” Foret said.

“People know contrails from an airplane where it’s a white stream in a blue sky. It was really lit up so it actually shot out of the sky and it looked quite unusual, not unlike a fireball.”

He said the clue to finding the object’s true identity is that it’s moving slowly.

“Of course, a fireball is going to streak across the sky very quickly, and this object was moving at the speed of a jet plane at that altitude,” Foret said.

Foret says smoke from the flaming wildfire makes for redder sunsets and moonrises, adding that it was easy to mistake the plane for a meteor because it was dark enough not to easily see the plane.

“I could see the plane in front. It wasn’t dark enough for the plane to disappear,” he said. “I imagine if it were a little bit darker and you couldn’t see the plane and you only saw the contrail illuminated by the setting sun, that might make you think there’s no plane in front.”

Foret said this is a phenomenon similar to that seen on the International Space Station.

“A lot of people have seen the space station fly over. When we see we’re looking at it from the sun that set hours ago and it’s just catching the space station at that particular altitude as it flies overhead. The same goes for the contrail,” he explained. “When it’s dark enough that you can’t see the plane, but you see the contrail, you just see what looks like a fireball, but when it’s flying very slowly, it’s not.”

While it might come as a disappointment that the mysterious celestial object was just an airplane, Foret said anything that makes people look up at the sky and wonder at what they see is a good thing.

“Anything that sparks curiosity about what’s out there,” he said. “As soon as we see something, we want to understand what it is, and as we try to understand what it is, we learn more and more.

“That’s the wonderful thing about astronomy – every time we discover something new, we ask ourselves 10 new questions that we don’t know the answer to.”