Well That Was Interesting
Jul. 2nd, 2012 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinLast night my roommate and I went for groceries and ended up with something completely different. We got to the intersection before our destination and in a gap between the building and a tree, saw this:
At least, that's what it would have looked like without any of the foreground elements, if I had been standing on the roof of the grocery store, and had a telephoto lens. The mountain visible is, I believe, one side of the Newhall Pass, so whatever-it-was should have been visible to anyone going north on the 5. At first glance it looked like one row of lights on an array at the high school football field; it was only after realising the high school was much further to our left, and noticing that the parallax relative to known objects, as we moved down the street, implied it was much further away than field lights of that size would be, that the oddness of what I was seeing became clear.
Unfortunately, when we crossed the intersection, a tree got in our way, so we aborted groceries for the time being and tried to get on a road with a clearer view. This took about five minutes, and by the time we saw that part of the horizon again the lights had gone. We retraced our route, to see if it had been something more fixed that would still be visible from that angle, but it wasn't.
There are any number of perfectly reasonable things it could have been. The most likely explanation I can think of is that the Burbank Airport is directly in line between the grocery store and Newhall Pass, so if a large plane with four very bright headlights along the wingspan had been landing from the north, it would have looked exactly like that ... but planes don't usually land from the north at Burbank, and I've never seen any with a light configuration like that. I did a little research this morning and found that the C-130 Hercules sometimes has a light on each of its four engines, in the arrangement we saw, but I have never seen airplane lights this bright. Perhaps it was equipped specifically for illumination?
Has anyone seen anything similar? Any ideas?
At least, that's what it would have looked like without any of the foreground elements, if I had been standing on the roof of the grocery store, and had a telephoto lens. The mountain visible is, I believe, one side of the Newhall Pass, so whatever-it-was should have been visible to anyone going north on the 5. At first glance it looked like one row of lights on an array at the high school football field; it was only after realising the high school was much further to our left, and noticing that the parallax relative to known objects, as we moved down the street, implied it was much further away than field lights of that size would be, that the oddness of what I was seeing became clear.
Unfortunately, when we crossed the intersection, a tree got in our way, so we aborted groceries for the time being and tried to get on a road with a clearer view. This took about five minutes, and by the time we saw that part of the horizon again the lights had gone. We retraced our route, to see if it had been something more fixed that would still be visible from that angle, but it wasn't.
There are any number of perfectly reasonable things it could have been. The most likely explanation I can think of is that the Burbank Airport is directly in line between the grocery store and Newhall Pass, so if a large plane with four very bright headlights along the wingspan had been landing from the north, it would have looked exactly like that ... but planes don't usually land from the north at Burbank, and I've never seen any with a light configuration like that. I did a little research this morning and found that the C-130 Hercules sometimes has a light on each of its four engines, in the arrangement we saw, but I have never seen airplane lights this bright. Perhaps it was equipped specifically for illumination?
Has anyone seen anything similar? Any ideas?
