objects in the sky

I live in Jacksons Point Ontario, Canada. It near Sutton, Ontario. My wife and were in our yard facing North on November 2nd. We knew about the comet debris/showers and never thought anything more of it. The next day, all the pictures I saw on the internet did not come close to what we saw. There were 25-30 of these things following each other across the night sky. I did manage to get some pictures. Anyone have any idea what these may be? When we were out looking, I managed to show the sky to a few neighbors who also did not know what they were. Anyone tell me how I can shrink the pics in order to post them? The 2 clear ones are 863kb. This site only allows 256kb.

Thanks,

imgur.com

can you link to a relevant article?

The Gimp is free image manipulation software
http://www.gimp.org/
It works on both windows and linux
once running select image then scale i find 640 or 320 pixels for width should drop a jpeg photo down to 256kb depending upon complexity of image.

I uploaded 2 pics here. As mentioned there were about 25-30 of these things. They were moving slowly from west to east as I was facing North. Any ideas?
I will try uploading them here with the Gimp software.

http://imgur.com/a/x9RYi

certainly no meteors.

It's almost impossible to judge from the images, but maybe helicopters?

what direction was the wind coming from that night?
Have you checked if there was some festivity on November 2nd in a place north-west of your yard? They might be those Chinese flying lantern things?

i know a helicopter when I see one. Don't know where 25-30 helicopters would be coming from/going. No noise coming from them. There were 5 people on my street that I showed these to. No other lights, just simply moving slowly across the sky. All orange orbs??
Anyone else have any better suggestions?

I think Chinese lanterns is a good bet they do move slowly if the wind is slow and the open flames that power them do give them an orange glow. Farmers over this side of the pond are trying to get them banned as they sometimes land still alight and set fire to fields.


edited to add

the lights in the sky tonight should be the Leonids

chinese lanterns....... give me a break.

give us better images?!

or describe in more detail what you have seen? (speed, estimated distance, etc.)

The provided information makes it impossible to explain what you have seen.

Those are the only pics I have. They were travelling west to east and distance I cannot guess. I did manage to get in touch with someone at the Canadian Space Agency and they are going to analyse the pictures (I have 8 in total) in thier lab and get back to me. They have the proper equipment to get more detail out of the images. When I hear back from them, I will post. I have been cruising the internet looking for some kind of similar pics, the closest to what I can find is a fireball, but there were, like I said 25-30 of them and fireballs don't seem to get this close to earth.

Looking at the weather data at World Weather Online, the wind was coming from the north east on that evening. And those photographs do look like this one on Wikipedia. So I'd go with lanterns as well, launched from anywhere on the northern or eastern shore of Lake Simcoe, or maybe even farther to the northeast.

But he wrote that they were moving from west to east, that would contradict the lantern theory if the wind was coming from the (north)east, hmm.

I spent quite some time online today searching for events around lake Simcoe on November second or other reports of those lights. The only thing I found was an ufo spotter page with reports about very similar sightings all around the world on various dates (always orange lights, 20 to 40 at a time, slow moving all in one direction). Some of those reports had updates that the items had indeed been Chinese lanterns, but none had images attached so who knows...

Hmm, how about countermeasure flares from practicing military aircraft? This picture for example shows a whole bunch of orange lights, and here they are in a nice line.

I had another look at the weather, and tried to go a bit closer. Here's the weather for Barrie, Ontario on the 2nd of November, and here for the third. Apparently on the second, the wind came mostly from the south, but it turned around rather rapidly around midnight and in the early hours of November 3rd, when it came from the west. So the lights could have drifted with the wind, depending on exactly when they were looking.

Of course, we don't know the source of these weather data (old predictions, measuments, reanalysis?), and with such a rapid shift, the situation was obviously dynamic. There may have also been different winds at different altitudes. But at least it doesn't appear to be impossible for it to be something drifting with the wind.

And here's a Youtube video of a CF-18 dispensing flares, and an image of same. The nearest base with CF-18's is in Bagotville, Quebec, which is almost 1000 km away though. The CF-18 can do that, but not without refueling if it's carrying any weapons.

I'll play. First a couple of more data points:

What time of night was it?

How long were they visible to you? Did you see them move from horizon to horizon?

If not, imagine the sky above you is a huge clock face and the East and West horizons are 3 and 9 o'clock respectively. How long did they take the objects to cross an hour's span of distance?

How high in the sky were they? Use the above clock method.

With that we might be able to give you a more educated guess.