2016-01-21 - Clayton, CA - Circle

Two bright red circular objects. Hovered brightly in one spot and then vanished.

Approx 10:00pm in Concord, CA, my daughter and I were arriving home and facing north, when I noticed two circle objects that were a reddish orange. They were different enough that I stopped the car and pointed them out to my daughter as possibly planets. She loves hearing about the stuff that goes on up there and at 5 loves the telescope. There were two when I first saw them and initially thought they were planets. With so many planets in sight soon, it was my initial thought because they weren't stars, shooting stars or airplanes. Clearly.

Then as I looked closer, I noticed they were the same exact shape and looked to be the same distance from myself, so being planets seemed impossible and the size was a little too large for a planet. One was a bit higher than the other one but directly on top of it. It was an odd site at first. They were bigger than an airplane and it never blinked green or any other color. They both looked to burning brightly the more I looked at them, and luckily, there were planes in the sky that were somewhat nearby and those gave a quick way to compare and notice the obvious difference between the two.

I then quickly parked my truck and took my daughter to walk back to where we could see them. When we got back over there, it was maybe 1-2 minutes later, the highest one was gone and the lower one looked to be a little closer but pretty similar to its last position. When looking at it, I felt like it was moving although its position in the sky wasn't really changing much. It's hard to explain.

As I watched for another couple minutes, telling my daughter to watch it and pay attention, it didn't seem to brighten or dull much other than the thin, low flying clouds coming in between us at times, but never lost visiblility of it. It sat there as bright as it had been and then quickly vanished. I couldn't explain it and thought, maybe clouds, but quickly saw another airplane fly in the same direction and it affirmed to me that it wasn't clouds and the quickness in which it disappeared affirmed to me that it wasn't the clouds that made it disappear from site. It wasn't an obstructed view, it disappeared from the sky. Like it just turned off.

Although it wasn't doing much, it didn't seem like anything I'd ever seen. The bright glow compared to an airplane and the way it moved or even the way it didn't move was just odd and I'm a sky watcher so this is coming from someone who watches a lot and this was the first time I believed I'd seen something out of my realm of understanding.