Full Name: Withheld by submitter
Email Address: dubroyfamily@gmail.com
Display Name: Dubes
Name of photo: Remembrance Day 2009 Sky Object, Ottawa 1-6
Location: Ottawa-Gatineau, Canada
Date of incident: 11 November 2009

Received a submission from Dubes (name withheld at submissioner's request) November 12, 2009). Dubes had managed to photograph an unusal object in the sky on Remembrance Day over Ottawa, Ontario.

The following is Dubes description of the event:

I was taking High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos of Gatineau across the Ottawa River from Nepean Point in Ottawa at 11:45AM on 11 November 2009. I was using a 14mm rectilinear lens on a full-frame camera, mounted vertically. My HDR photos were taken in two bursts of three exposures in close sequence (within one second per burst). The two bursts were 14 seconds apart. Upon close examination of the photos that evening, I noticed a white object in the clear blue sky travelling southwesterly. In the first frame, a faint contrail suggests the angle of descent was steeper than 45°, assuming the object was moving in a plane perpendicular to the camera. By the 4th frame (14 seconds later), the angle of descent had changed to 19°.

This all happened while our Prime Minister, our Governor General, Prince Charles, and Princess Camilla were in line of sight of the object at the National War Memorial at the corner of Elgin Street and Wellington Street.

I cropped the photos to show only the object and a portion of Gatineau for reference. The original photos are in CR2 raw format and do not have as many jpg artifacts. However, the HDR bursts of three exposures were at 1) average exposure, followed by 2) two stops over and 3) two stops under. I adjusted for theses exposure differences somewhat in the attached jpgs, but some variation in sky colour is still evident. The first of the six photos shows the greatest detail, such as it is, so I cropped it to show only the object and the faint contrail.

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