2022-04-30 - Binghamton, NY - Sphere

Orange/reddish light, slightly pulsating in brightness (~4 sec intervals) moving from southeast to south. Occured 3 times.

About 9:00pm, while watching TV from my recliner, I glanced out the sliding glass doors and noticed a fairly bright orange/reddish light to the southeast. My first thought was it's probably a jet with its landing lights still on after departing from an airport in the NYC area. But the color seemed wrong and there was no strobe light flashing as would normally be expected. So, I grabbed my binoculars for a closer look and saw that it was not a typical aircraft. Initially it appeared to be moving in my general direction but then began moving to my right, heading south without a change in brightness, thus ruling out landing lights which are very directional. It quickly sped up and began to fade rather rapidly. I scrambled to get my DSLR camera with a 200mm telephoto lens but by the time I was ready to shoot the object was very faint, and finally vanished. But then, it either reappeared or a new one appeared to the southeast and was quite bright, perhaps a bit brighter than a typical sodium vapor street light seen from about a half mile (0.75km). The object again started moving upward and southward and over the course of about 1-2 minutes faded into the thin clouds (at about 10,000 ft) until it disappeared, ... only to again reappear brightly near the last one's starting point. This third pass was the last one. I did manage to get some shaky video and sorted through the video to find a few good representative frames that I then merged into a single image. Taking hand held video with a telephoto lens is no easy task. After the object passed for the third time I figured I'd get a tripod, but the object did not return during the next few hours and I finally gave up looking. The camera's focus and details in the image are a bit suspect but the image is a good representation of what I saw. Again, without much prep and mediocre camera skills, not an easy video to take. Saw a similar object back in Aug 2018 and was told, rather dismissively, "drone". Haven't heard of any amateur drones that glow bright orange, can fly for several miles from the controller and can go to 10K feet altitude. Military Drone? Flying over boring Southern NY, glowing brightly for everyone to see? Okay then, tax dollars well spent? For what it's worth I've always been an enthusiastic sky-watcher, weather watcher, avid amateur astronomer my whole life, a private pilot, and have a mechanical engineering degree to go along with my love of all things science. For 10-yrs of my engineering career I worked for a government contractor on, ... well, "stuff". i.e. "Deep Stuff", so I have that background as well. I know where planets/stars appear in the sky and what they look like, and what the ISS, satellites, meteors, fireballs and comets look like as well. I love aviation, owned a small plane for several years, been to many airshows and know how planes can appear in the sky both day and night. This object did not fit my observational experience, hence, UFO. Don't know what it was but I know a lot of what it wasn't.