2005-02-06 - Napa, CA - Light

Orange light slowly travels across the sky and rapidly ejects smaller lights downward from it, before disappearing.

I had just come home from work and was unloading my car, making several trips into the house. I noticed an orange point of light in the North sky close to the horizon. It was the approximate brightness of aircraft headlights. At first I didn't pay much attention to it, but as I noticed the light gradually moving in my general direction, the orangeness of the light struck me as being odd, as aircraft have white headlights, red strobe lights, red and green wingtip lights, and white wingtip strobes. This had none of those lights required by the FAA. I also started to notice that although this light was moving a bit slower than a satellite, it's speed kept changing. Just enough to notice. It would speed up and slow down as it moved from North to South. As it got closer I kept listening, but never heard any engines or any noise at all. I also noticed that it began swerving slightly and it's overall direction changed to a Southeasterly direction. The intensity of the light remained constant. It got to a point where it was as close to me as it was going to get and was now moving left to right. It was a mostly clear night, with a few patchy areas of stratus clouds. A couple of times this object passed behind a cloud and could still see some light through it. It's altitude was hard to guess, but high enough to be above the low clouds. At it's closest point, it was about 35 to 40 degrees above the horizon. By this time I had run into to house to retrieve a pair of binoculars to get a better look at this. I focused in on it, and it was a solid orange point of light. It left no vapor or smoke trail. As it moved southeast I suddenly saw a smaller "piece" of the orange light fall or get ejected downward from the object. The odd thing is, the "piece" kept the same forward velocity as the parent object as it fell rapidly downward, so it did not lag behind or trail as it fell. Once it fell, it quickly twinkled out. Then I saw another piece drop, and then another, in the same exact fashion. Then the parent object quickly faded out into the blackness of the night sky. Nothing further was seen.

Had this been a satellite or space junk burning up in the atmosphere, any pieces breaking off would stay together and slowly drift apart. The "piece" was moving downward at about the same speed as it was moving forward. Not sure what to make of this.