Sunday, September 23, 2012

UFO?

Last night the boys were outside in the backyard eating ice cream when Cooper says, "Daddy, come look, there are 2 moons!"  I didn't know what to think about that.  I thought that it was probably just a bright star or planet by the moon.  I went outside and I saw something that I had never before seen.  It was a big, bright, glowing orb that was pretty close to the moon. Take a look:

So, I got out the camera and zoomed in the best I could (optical zoom because any more than that you lose your quality, well our camera sucks anyway so not much quality), I snapped a photo, and this is what it looked like:



Then, I looked at that picture, and zoomed it in, and this is what it looked like:



A hot air balloon?  That is weird because even though we see them all the time here in ABQ, they are never out at night, and they never glow like that, and in addition, this one wasn't moving, it didn't move for about an hour.  It was just sitting there.  So, come to find out, there is a guy in our ward who works for the air traffic control here in ABQ, and he said that it was a high altitude ballon 600 feet tall, 400 feet wide, with a payload of 6000 pounds!  That is a HUGE balloon, because it was 120,000 feet up, that is almost 23 miles!  Pretty cool finding by the Coopster!

2 comments:

Shapiro said...

I wouldn't doubt it if it was a UFO! :) You guys ARE close to Roswell you know! ;) One of the things that first attracted me to Marcus was that he, his brother, and his sister decided to take a trip down to Roswell for the UFO conference just to check it out and get some good entertainment... they ran in the Alien Chase 5k and met some pretty interesting and funny people. You guys should go some time - could be some good laughs - and you could wear t-shirt with your "balloon" on them! Fun times - I didn't know there were high altitude balloons - that is pretty cool. Way to go Cooper! :)

Shalie said...

WHOO you guys are gonna be famous for these pictures!!