see it for yourself:

http://www.myfoxcleveland.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=3114625&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=VSTY&pageId=3.1.1

what do you think?

(link updated 5/5/07 3:03pm)

I think that it could be almost anything, as the quality of the video is so bad.

In the first short clip, I was saying “Is that not the full moon?”

Then when they showed more footage it just looked like a balloon.

They said it moved to and fro. Like… a balloon caught in the gusts of wind.

I agree.  It looks like the full moon in a really bad quality, shakey video.  It’s near impossible to tell.

This is Venus.

The “disc” of light in the second part of the video (see attached screenshots) clearly is an out of focus image of a stellar point source. No doubt about that, you can see the typical ring pattern that results of that.

Direction is given as SE-NW, i.e. WEST. And it concerned a bright light, “brighter than any star”

Venus (the planet) is a very bright sight in the western evening sky at the moment. Indeed, it is brighter than any star. The description of “sometimes bluish gasses coming out of it, and the next moment perfectly round but with patterns” also points to an unsharp image of Venus, the “blue” being due to atmospheric refraction as it is low in the sky.

I.e., there is no doubt in my mind that this is a typical Venus sighting again, sightings that are responsible for many UFO reports.

Thank you, LaMa.  You’re so smart!
I think there’s an opening at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for an astronomer if you’re interested. ;o)

Apart from the fact that a Natural History museum is an odd place for an astronomer, professional astronomers are certainly not always the right persons to turn to with these kinds of observations. While knowing all of fusion processes in stellar nuclei or the formation of black holes, they usually have very little practical knowledge of mundane night sky phenomena. Being a high-level amateur astronomer, I have a lot of contacts in the professional astronomy world, and it by no means is unusual to stand under a starry sky with one of those professional guys/girls, and note (s)he can’t even correctly identify the major constellations.

Yup. Specially english speaking ones. Everybody knows it

Venus as a bright object in the evening twilight sky. Wide angle image shot by me yesterday evening.

[IMG]http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b176/marcoaliaslama/MoH/venus.jpg[/IMG]

[quote author=“Beasjt

I remember the nights on Formentera (Balearic Isalnd) as a kid. There was no electricity. Only one man called Amador, who had a bar halfway down the island, had a lightbulb and a fridge, which ran on a old dieselgenerator. On moonless nights the stars would be enough to walk around at night. But people can

Yes, the weather predictions are bad for coming evening. A few nights ago we had unusally clear skies though.

I am an observing amateur astronomer for almost 30 years now (started at age 6 with an interest in astronomy, observing since age 9, my first telescope when I was 10). Here in western Holland, sky quality is very poor (still, I manage to do some useful work). When we want(ed) to have dark skies we either went to the Flevo-polder, or some other country. I have observed from Spain (a.o. on Calar Alto), Portugal, France, the Gobi desert and Arizona. Nothing beats the beauty of a dark sky down to magnitude +7.0 from a desert or a mountain.