PPRuNe Forums - Unknown orange/red glow over Pacific Ocean

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All
Would think about fluorescing with regards the spots, but my experience of extensive (wife will explain Game/ Sport fishing) lights is normally green. I have being do this for a long time world wide, and have not seen bright colours such as this and not from 30k + ft . Squid lights I have seen many times fishing , night diving, and from 30k+ ft all over South China sea , Indian Ocean and other areas but not like that. Lightning Sprites / gas from earthquakes would be my guess although when I did my mining engineering degree, this stuff was all Tomorrow's World, I was more worried about 14000ft of Carbon Leader Reef / Van Reef above, than gas escapes to the atmosphere.

Interesting photos though, and I can not believe that the "cabin" will not have some one on board who has not seen similar, given amount of air travel currently going on, that's why you should be able to keep the blinds up, to link with another thread !.

Regards
Mr Mac

I have no idea what it could be but, I think the TEPCO Godzilla is coming alive ;)

The green glow at the top of the pictures is almost certainly auroral, given the present level of solar activity.
Could the orange glow be caused by the release, (and ignition), of 'gas-hydrates' from the sea floor?

Quote:

I'm smelling a fishing fleet.

From 34,000 feet? ;)

Fishing fleets are easily seen at night from 34,000' -- or 43,000'. many of them use VERY bright lights to attract the fish. The ones in the Sea of Japan often resemble cities, they are so dense.

Recently I have seen several fleets under the NOPAC routes FAR away from Japan or Anchorage...

The pilot who reported this story responded on some questions:
Unknown orange/red glow over Pacific Ocean - Airwork

Quote:

About (squid)fishing fleet and why I think they are not the cause of the red lights/glow;

-First of all; these fleets fish with relatively small vessels and the lights we saw were HUGE. If they were a fleet of ships, I expect them to be very large military vessels, or even oil platforms, and not fishing ships. I have seen many of those fleets in many parts of the world and the lights are very small normally.

- Fishing boats always use bright green or white lights since those lights penetrate the seawater deepest. Red light (or orange) is never used for fishing, since it does not attract any fish and the second problem is that the light frequency of red (and orange) does not penetrate deep into the blue seawater. It is therefore unusable for fishing at sea. The color as seen in my photos is the same color we saw with the naked eye.

- Fishing boats (especially fishing for squid) are hunting on the continental shelf, or preferably on the edge of the shelf where the continental plate plunges into the deep sea, since this is the place where most fish come to breed and eat. Fishing with such a large fleet in the deepsea so far from the continental plate does not make sense and for as far as I know and could find out, never happens. Please look into this and you'll see my point.
Check my last two uploaded maps with the coordinates of the sighting and you'll see that the location is very far away from the nearest continental shelf.

Please note that I am not drawing any conclusions here, though the cause being a fishing-fleet can almost immediately be dismissed.
Me and my colleague have a lot of experience with nightflights and flying over those fishing fleets in Asia and the (South-)Atlantic.. What we saw here was according to our observation absolutely not a (squid) fishing fleet but possibly a large military Russian fleet during a (possibly secret, since the airspace was not closed) salvage or missile-test (might explain the flash 20-30 minutes before). The same day, a large US military exercise took place South of Japan. More information to follow soon probably.

The green light does look like Aurora to me but there are other phenomena that can look similar to that in the picture,as explained at Spaceweather.com, there are some pics here-
Sprite, Air Glow Gravity Waves, Stars, Storms
no idea about the red lights though.

Another pic and explaination of Airglow Ripples here-
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Colored lights off of Kamchatka

A cargo pilot named JPC van Heijst reported this a few weeks ago. A large multicolored display of lights lasting about 30mn. Not sure which section of the forum it should go in; if it's already been posted please delete!
Probably not aliens, but a pretty cool story with amazing pictures!
Unknown orange/red glow over Pacific Ocean - August 24, 2014 Photo Gallery by Flying Dutchman at pbase.com

Looks like CNN haven't been paying attention, it was indeed discussed here on Pprune a couple of weeks back:

http://www.pprune.org/spectators-bal...fic-ocean.html

Flew nearby the area 3 nights ago. Saw nothing but pitch black. A voice popped up on guard asking if anyone else was out there. Being a gentleman, I replied. The voice asked if I was seeing a bunch of red. I thought she meant on the weather radar, so I said No. Another voice came up and said that there was something on the internet about this and it was perhaps an underwater volcano. Her last words were about how cool it looked.

I was on R220 and saw nothing. She gave her coordinates as around N45 E154.Looks like A590 is the airway to be on based on her report and the website location.

Maybe the Russkies are up to no good again.

Hi, Im the pilot in question and the photographer of the photos.

To quickly answer a few questions I came across here;

- The photos are sharp and without startrails because I always use a 10.5mm Fisheye lens for my night-time cockpit photos. The wider the lens, the more margin you get for very slight movements. With a normal smooth ride the photos always come out sharp, up to shutter times of 30 seconds.
I have many more examples of night-time cockpit photography on the rest of my site, if you follow the link to the pbase gallery as posted below.

- I have heard from other pilots that they have spotted large groups of red lights over the Pacific since last 2 months. Never heard from pilots who saw those lights before, neither have the other pilots who saw the lights recently. Although I believe it very well could be a fishing fleet, red light does not make sense since it doesn't attract fish, its wavelength is absorbed very quickly (in comparison to white/green lights) and is thus unusable for fishing.

- Lots of military activity in the Pacific at the moment. Could indicate a military fleet or possibly some sort of exercise since military ships often use red lights to illuminate the ship and keep night vision, but the brightness of the red lights doesn't make sense... they would even blind their own personnel.

- My photos are currently being analyzed by a Frenchman who is trying to make some exact calculations on the photos and estimate its size and its origin. When anything new comes up I'll try to let you know.

- Any feedback, ideas or thoughts from pilots who have seen those lights too, or are flying there often are welcome!