MISSOULA — If you’ve looked up at the night sky recently, you may have noticed some things that look a little out of the usual.
You may have noticed bright, and I mean bright, balls of light in the sky. Sometimes it looks like these balls of light are flashing and might be moving around. So what exactly is going on here?
WEB EXTRA: Bright lights in the sky over Western Montana:
“What I like to often say to my intro students is you know, don’t feel bad if you've ever gotten overly stimulated and excited by Venus because often when people see Venus in the sky, they don't initially know what they're looking at because it is so, fantastically bright on some evenings,” said Dr. Mark Reiser, lecturer and planetarium director at the University of Montana.
Right now, Venus is rather far from the Earth, often seen right after sunset high in the southwestern sky. But what about some of the other bright lights?
“In the east, you've got bright Jupiter. Which is pretty high in the sky by sunset right now, and then you've got Sirius rising behind Orion, not right at sunset, but a little bit a little bit later,” explained Reiser.
Watch video of the full story:
Venus, Jupiter and Sirius explain the bright lights, but what about when they move?
“They're basically point sources of light. So, you take a little point source of light and run it through this big filter of all these atmospheric gases and you get refraction the second it enters a different medium than the vacuum of space and it bends and then you get, convection currents that are also changing the density of what it's passing through and you just get various distortions from our atmosphere,” explained Reiser.
If you want to see this phenomenon for yourself, check out the video attached to the top of this article. Focus on the light on the screen and try not to look away for 20 or so seconds.
“Just over the course of a few moments if you just watch long enough, your brain tends to create motion that's not there and it throws people off often and they're convinced that something's moving when it's not,” said Reiser.
If you saw it move, you’re not alone.
“That's why probably fighter pilots have engaged Venus in aerial combat before,” joked Reiser.
So, if you’re seeing some things in the sky that make you question if it’s a star, don’t fret and know that you are not alone in being duped.
