Anomolous light over Gainesville Virginia
Date and time: February 5th 2025 7:57pm Location: Bristow Va 20136, USA The latitude and longitude of Bristow, Virginia is: 38° 43' 23" N / 77° 32' 12
Hi, did anyone else just see an anomolous light over the gainesville/bristow area of Virginia? I suck and only got two pictures and not a video.(blame my boss bc I was on a work call when I caught it with my eye and switched over to camera mode on my Samsung). Thought maybe Venus at first behind a cloud because it looked like it was refracting through light cloud cover. Also, in a similar part of night sky as Venus but defenitly not Venus bc Venus is still up there and still not moving around Airplane soeed acros the sky lol. No flashing or strobing lights. Just a solid large white light about the visual size of Venus/Jupiter in the night sky. Estimated to be brighter than Jupiter but not quite as bright as Venus. Moved from west to east just before 8pm. Again, one solid white light, no lights visible on a wing structure and no flashing indicating navigation marker lights. No other colors observed besides white. No noise but seemed pretty high altitude.(id estimate based on comparing to normal air traffic in the area at least 10k feet). If a plane at that height, 100% would hear noise as it flew over.It looked like it trailed whatever cloud was with it because it then started to form a halo as it moved. Saw it visually for about 20 seconds and then it just shut off/disapeared. First pic shows the refracting of the light around it like a star pattern, second shows it about 5 seconds later as the star refracting formed into a halo around it. *Note all other points of light in pics are stars and compare the brightness. Again, got the second pic taken while still on the phone and then lost it (any visual of the light) maybe 5 seconds later.
I generally look into the sky for a few minutes every evening/night and am very very familiar with what Air Traffic is in my area and what the normal air traffic observables are. Again, sorry all I got was two phone pics but I wanted to post just in case someone else in the area happened to see it and could confirm the anomolous nature of it.
Thanks!