2015-11-24 - Farmington, UT - Formation

Expanding triangle-shaped puff seen early morning

Early morning, November 24th, 2015, after taking pictures of the moon setting over Farmington Bay in Utah, I was walking back to my car when I noticed a very faint, what looked like a cloud puff in the sky. It was odd because there were no other clouds in that part of the sky. This was just a lone circle cloud, very faint, sitting above the mountains to the east of me. So faint that it would not have been noticeable to someone unless they were doing some observing of the sky that morning.

When I first noticed it I'm guessing it was approximately 30 degrees from horizon.

Because it was so faint to see I wasn't able to take video of it. Instead, I used my Nikon D90 to shoot long exposures at high ISO. I used the built-in sequencer to shoot 9 shots in a row for each sequence and I adjusted the exposure time somewhat between sequences.

Because I was finished shooting the moonset and was walking a few miles to get back to my car I wasn't very interested in exploring this very faint puff in the sky. But I decided to shoot a few shots and then look more closely at them when I got home. So, after the first 20 or so shots I started walking back to the car again. I walked for another 13 minutes before I paused to review the picture that I took on the screen on my camera. When I zoomed into my shots I noticed the three distinct puffs and then realized that this was something unusual.

https://flic.kr/s/aHsmafaWoN

I then set up to shoot as many shots as I could before the sun came up. This is why the latter shots look like the object has scattered more until the sun came up and washed it out completely.

You'll notice that the object seems to move at about the same speed as the stars around it which suggests that it must be a considerable distance from the earth.

I have no idea what this thing was. I admit, it doesn't look very much like a flying object but more like some kind of space weather anomaly. Not sure what to make of it.