Light streak in the sky, April 5th 2020
I stumbled upon a weird streak of light on one of my older images by pure accident, something I only discovered now and did not see when I took the images at the time. Other photos taken 10 seconds before and 12 seconds later don't show anything unusual at all.
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The photo was taken while flying track 066' over the Atlantic Ocean on April 5th 2020 at 20:37:27 UTC. Location was just south of Nova Scotia, 45°27’N 60°47'W at 41,000 ft.
Camera used was the Nikon D850 + Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 ED for this shot with the following settings: 22mm, 1/4000s, f/6.3, ISO160 and autofocus. Images are 100% unedited, extracted from RAW image.
I'm breaking my head over what could have caused this flash of light. Judging from the shutter-time of 1/4000s, something moved at incredible speed with pretty consistent and extreme brightness, possibly reflecting sunlight. Looking forward to serious analysis of the speed/size/nature of this light, taking into account shutter-time and relative altitudes/distances.
Zooming in on the light streak it shows various colours: this could be an artefact of the glass lens elements.
Open to all serious suggestions to what this could have been.
Possible explanations:
- Meteor / shooting star:
Meteors generally tend to move much slower and not as bright as this one. Never seen one during daylight. Even if it would be a daylight meteor, it would probably have been a major explosion like the Chelyabinsk meteor. A meteor would have left a bright contrail in its wake as well and shown up on other photos. Unlikely.
- Space debris / discarded rocket booster burning up:
I've seen a couple those events and they tend to move rather slow and break apart spectacularly in a group of lights during their fiery descent. They looked nothing like this.
- Satellite/ISS:
Would match the size, but neither the speed and brightness. Unlikely to see them during daylight.