Coming out of Home Depot, I happened to glance up and I saw the underside of a C-5 coming in for a landing. I’m so used to hearing them that I don’t usually look up anymore. This was very cool though. It was so low, I thought it was going to hit the Home Depot sign. It’s very hard to believe something so big can stay up in the air.
A thunderstorm in Maryland. The lightening and thunder came at exactly the same time. The lightening was brilliant. It hit a few houses only 2 streets away from where I was. I’ve never seen a storm like that in any other state.
Lots of people have mentioned lunar eclipses, but I’ve never been impressed with them really. I’ve seen three or four of them and they were just kind of … meh. Maybe the solar eclipses have spoilt it for me.
I’m a city girl, so the sky, to me, is the moon and a handful of bright stars I can recognize.
Camping in Oregon’s Newberry caldera a few years ago, I saw the sky as I never had before. The sky wasn’t black! It was silvery with millions of stars!
I understand now why ancient cultures saw gods in the sky.
I once walked about a mile to some railroad tracks to watch a bad storm approach. I was watching bright green lightning (lightning through hail) when a wall of rain hit me. I stood underneath some coal cars and tried not to touch anything metal for 30 minutes while the storm raged on. Froze my ass off. Worth all the misery.
in 1974 there was an F5 tornado that killed 33 people in Xenia. I saw a perfect formation of mamary clouds from the storm that followed behind it. I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to that formation.
About 10 years ago we had a series of “leading edge” tornados drop in my area and I was able to watch 3 of them form. They didn’t drop down but appeared to pop into visual existence as the pressure changed inside the vortex. It looked like pieces of a puzzle forming inside the vortex until a complete tornado could be seen.
Ooo, yeah, I forgot about that. One night ten or twelve years ago, the aurora was visible here in Seattle. That was freaky cool. None of the people I was with had ever seen it, myself included, so we had a few minutes of anxiety (“are aliens invading?”) before we figured out what it was.
A large meteor: apparent size of a pencil eraser seen head-on held at arm’s length. I think it streaked across the sky for more than a second and I even think I heard sound resulting from it, but I was pretty young so I can’t be sure these memories are accurate.
A Magnificent Frigatebird directly overhead perfectly silouetted against the sky. Surprised that no one else on the boat seemed to notice it.
Lenticular clouds in the Sierra Nevada, very beautiful.
Any number of sunsets would count if I could possibly describe them.
I was in the Marine Corps Reserves in Marietta, GA and was driving by the Reserve AFB when I saw an odd aircraft take off with a chase plane next to it. It was on of the first operational flights of the new F/A-22 Raptor.
Two shooting stars – one a roiling green fireball that left a glowing trail hanging in the night sky for a lingering moment – the other a large white ball glimpsed through a gap in the clouds just as I decided there was no hope of seeing a damn thing.
A “Tante Ju” JU 52 - looking and sounding like a flying shed
A Shorts Sunderland flying boat, which I would have given anything to have been on, since it was flying up to land on Windermere in the Lake District – where I hail from and where I saw a Brocken Spectre
(Though that was more sideways rather than up – from the tops of fells I’ve looked * down * on RAF planes practising low flying )
A giant donut of smoke made for some reason in the cloudless skies near Norwich by an unknown aviator – rendered pinky-orange by the dying sun.
As a little kid having a Vulcan bomber go directly overhead at approx zero feet – totally filling the sky – and then the sound arrived! (Only a top-fuel dragster comes close in literally shaking the ground)
Just getting out into the country and looking up on a clear pitch-black night to see things that are farther away in distance and time than my head can hold.
I think I mentioned this before, but it certainly fits here. Back in 87 I was at Ft Bragg and out on bivouac. It was late, about midnight and up in the sky was something about the size of half a matchstick, held at arms length. With what looked to be wispy flames coming off the leading edge. I had a buddy confirm that I wasn’t seeing things, and we watched it for 15 minutes, just floating across the sky, very slowly. I assume it was a piece of space debris, but have no clue what it really was.
A few years ago, one bright, clear morning on the way into work I was stuck on the train just outside London Bridge station. I looked up and saw a medium sized commercial airliner turning overhead, probably lining up for an approach to Heathrow or something. The tip of one wing passed close to a small puff of cloud and the vortex shed from the edge of the flight surface twisted it up into a great spiral that glinted almost like liquid ice in the sunlight.
I think I was the only one on the train who saw it - I was certainly the only one who, forgetting where he was for a moment, said “wow” out loud. I got some funny looks for the remainder of that journey.
Got to see a Nimrod demonstration using anti aircraft flares and a lot of high-angle-of-attack maneuvers. I remember thinking they were pushing the plane WAY too hard and a couple of months later they lost it at a Toronto air show. Never understood why there were 7 crew members in an exhibition flight.
SR-71’s also made quite a statement as they went by in full afterburner.
Kayaking in a mountain lake during one of the big meteor showers. I was so far out in the middle of nowhere that the sky was chock-full of stars (enough to deserve mention here alone), and I’d have had to try not to see all the meteors shooting across the sky. I just lay back and watched for an hour or so.
In January, 2000, I climbed to the top of Mt. Villarica - an active volcano in central Chile as part of an organized trek. It was a beautiful, clear day, and not a cloud could be found in the sky. When I reached the summit, I looked up and saw a perfectly round smoke-ring that had been emitted from the crater. It was an amazing sight, as it was the only thing to be seen in the sky. Fortunately, I had my camera ready and now have a really cool picture.
Besides a UFO a few years back (no, wasn’t a glowing disk with little green men, was a dot about as bright as Venus that went from moving slowly in one direction then shooting straight up as it faded out over maybe 2 seconds) I’d have to say the coolest thing I’ve ever seen was a ‘moonbow’ a few weeks ago that was EXTREMELY bright and large.
When I was a kid, in Panama, one of my father’s buds was a charter boat captain, and he had a house on an island out in Las Perlas. We went out with him one weekend, and came back at night. It was the first time I saw the sky without light pollution. Wow, the Mily Way really is a river of light!
Hale-Bopp up in the mountains in Germany, away from most of the city lights. Very clear and discernible.
The 99 solar eclipse. We were in Stuttgart, at the zoo. It was a cloudy day, but the clouds retreated for totality. We were at the camel enclosure during totality, and the camels were very interesting. As soon as it started getting dark, the camels got very agitated. When the sun was down to a sliver, the adults formed a circle with the babies in the middle. They stayed there until there was a fair amount of returning sunlight (late evening or cloudy day level) and then they went back to grazing as if nothing had happened.
Just last week, on the last leg of our trip home from vacation, my wife and I spent the night in a hotel in Lincoln NE near the airport. As we were leaving town the next morning, my wife made a comment that, as close as we were to the airport, she was surprised that we hadn’t heard a lot of airplane traffic. Not being too familiar with how big the Lincoln airport is, I started to say “Maybe they don’t get a lot of big planes coming in” – when I noticed a jetliner approaching for a landing. As it got closer and closer, I realized it was a 747 coming in. Then, just as it was maybe a couple hundred feet from touching down, it suddenly pulled up and started to circle around for another approach. And as it did so, I noticed that the plane had no markings except for a flag on the tail and a blue stripe down the side. I told my wife, “Um… I think that’s Air Force One!” We saw it circle around and head back in, but by that time we were already too far south so I don’t know for sure if it landed but I assume it did. I spent all weekend on the internet trying to figure out, to no avail, whether it was AF1, or if not, who’s plane it was. As far as I know, nobody had a campaign stop scheduled in Nebraksa, and even so, why not land in Omaha instead of Lincoln?
Second would be when I was a kid growing up in St Louis, one night we saw this weird greenish glowing thing flying around in the sky for over an hour. Of course, being kids, we all thought it was a UFO. Turned out to be a helicopter flying around with a lighted 7-UP sign.
There are several things I saw that I remember clearly, two lightning storms and two sightings of the Aurora Borealis
The first was the awesome thunder and lightning storm, we had just come in from our trip out east and were driving back to the city to go home, the sky was extremely dark with clouds and I remember just sitting in the back seat watching the lightning flash across the sky over the city…
Another thunder and lightning storm, only this time it was snowing. I woke up to loud rumblings of thunder and I looked out my window to see the storm. To my amazement snow was drifting down and it muffled the thunder somewhat even as it reflected the lightning and made it brighter.
The first northern lights that I recall seeing was when we were out camping with family and friends. There were only two of us girls so we had wandered off to clean up before bed and were coming back, we look up in the distance and fall silent as we spot the northern lights, dancing just over the badlands with a backdrop of stars. Ended up racing back to the camp and pointing it out to my dad and his friend. We all just sat there and enjoyed the view for a bit, I think we were about the only ones awake in the whole campsite.
The other one I remember I was at summer camp, every night we had a fire going and would sing songs and just enjoy ourselves. Well this one night, about halfway through and we were getting pretty rowdy with the singing a couple of us look up and just fall silent. Soon everyone else falls silent and just stares up at the sky where the northern lights made shapes above us, framed by trees.
These all stick in my mind and I like to bring them up and think about them from time to time. I just wish I could’ve taken pictures, but I doubt it would’ve done them justice.
