White Wisps

(Down From Angels Wings)

I assumed these were the Flying Spider phenomenon that frequents our area. Now I'm sure it is not.

The sky is literally "crawling" with these creatures during their fly-overs. (the spiders) Landing on everything, including people. And just as many keep drifting on by. It had been an annual event around here and I would like to see the city council declare it as such. It's a sight you don't forget soon. But the frequency seems to be thinning out. Some are drifting on a single strand of silk up to a hundred feet long (Texas type)  and some make flying carpets and parachutes of silk. (West Coast type)  They can drift with the air currents for hundreds of miles. The last large migration I heard about was in Texas in 2004 or 2005. The Texas description call them Balloon Spiders. Ours on the West Coast are not. I'll have to research the archives to find what we had called them.

Update: We referred to them as Parachute Spiders.

Most people around here don't even pay attention to them anymore, unless they land of your face. They leave blankets of gossamer where they light.  One group that does pay attention is the ag-industry. If the farmers can predict when they land, they can eliminate 1/3 of the pesticides they normally use. Here's a good description of our type:

A Fascinating Sight

Mass spider migration covers paddocks in cobwebs

Update: 

I'm positive these captures are not the spiders. They only migrate on warm, sunny days. During the latest captures we conducted tests with binoculars and a Canon GL/1 digital camcorder and they couldn't be seen in them. And the spiders are visible with the naked eye. The spiders altitude seems to be a maximum of a couple hundred feet. The scope wouldn't detect this. That leaves high altitude objects, as they are only detectable through the scope. I've captured some that are boomerang shape with wisps of white "something" trailing behind them.

Update: 

These videos get progressively better in being able to see the objects because of contrast and color enhancement. I didn't want to remake all of them so you could see what I saw as they passed.

White Wisps

(not enhanced)

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New Wisp Captures 06/22/07

Last night wasn't ideal conditions for viewing the Moon in my area but I captured a couple of dozen of these things in 33 different thirty-second clips. I'm compiling them into short AVI's for best results.Here's the first. I've included a few enhanced blow-ups from 3 different frames.

Some facts on the objects:

Some are captured in the daytime but most at night. They would have to be at a very high altitude to reflect the sunlight at night or be even higher and outside the atmosphere. On a few of the clips, I captured 2 and 3 of them in the same clip going in different directions. Winds are from the NW which is from right to left in the videos. Most are heading into the wind, some across the wind, assuming they are in the atmosphere. Out of all these captured last night, none are traveling with the winds direction. All of them seem to have the same general shape, almost boomerang like. None of these seem to have anything trailing behind them.

A friend was standing next to the scope with binoculars looking at the same time and I would signal him when I saw one on the screen. He never saw anything with or without the binoculars. We wanted to eliminate fluff in the air, pollen spores and any other low altitude flyers that can be seen with and without binoculars. And I can say we did that.

In this video like this first one, I cropped the time out that wasn't necessary and didn't add text or transitions to keep the file size down. And did three repeats of each segment.

Wisps 2

(not enhanced)

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These are small enhanced JPG's
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Update: 06/24/07

OK, this is getting too weird.

These are not boomerang shaped, they're round!

That must be why I thought they had something trailing behind them. It's about the focus. Tonight I'm going to back-off the focus, away from the Moon in an attempt to bring these things in focus. This one shows the segment repeated 3 times at original settings and 3 at enhanced contrast and color settings. Then some enhanced frames. The last frame is a PhotoShop auto-color variation. It looks like we have a hole in this object too.

Round Wisp

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Wisp 4

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This one shows 3 of them in the same clip, about one second apart, going in three different directions. Two repeats at normal, three at enhanced, one at 1/2 speed and one at 1/4 speed.
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