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But that's an elevation difference of 0.41°, which is more than a FOV vertically. You wouldn't see any clouds at the end in that case; they'd sink out of the frame around halfway through. That's why the simulation with clouds is useful. But in your scenario, shouldn't the camera be tilting down...

Actually, the necessary altitude gain is not steady — which makes sense, as the F-18 is horizontally approaching the object slower at the beginning vs. the end. So, in addition to having a negative horizontal acceleration, an object at 10 NM needs a positive vertical acceleration in order to...

Thank you. It's been a long haul. This is what that looks like (at 2x speed). The white block is 10 NM from the starting point (and 7.1 NM from the ending point, which raises the question about how "10 NM" is defined): The initial horizontal speed of the sightline at 10 NM is about 200...

I guess a drone is even more mundane than a drug plane. But did they think it wasn't a drone?

How would that work in terms of the image produced in the video?

There's also the asymmetry/shape. IR glare seems to be typically circular, or at least symmetrical. But here we have something that looks kind of like a teardrop in white-hot, and a flying saucer in black-hot.

Since it was flying below ~22,000 feet, I suppose it could have been heading back to Kennedy (i.e., away from the off-Jacksonville area). And if it was descending at 3° slope, it could have been a bit farther away than the 30 NM straight-and-level case.

That's a good question. My guess is we could only be certain by directly comparing a jet to Gimbal, as photographed on the same (or at least similar) system, using the same zoom setting. The example above isn't shot at .35°, I don't think. The ATFLIR also seems to be more sensitive (the sky is...

I wouldn't rule that out. Generally though, I'm more interested in physical mechanisms than people's memories and stories.

It's fun to think about what happened after the end of the videos, and why the videos end where it do. It's not like the tape ran out. It seems that in the Gimbal case, one of the following must have happened: the pilot either continued to pursue the object and made a course correction, or...

Venezuela, DR, Bahamas, and Georgia (all of which are mentioned in the stories linked above) fall on a line that passes off the coast of Jacksonville. If it was a restricted airspace (I haven’t been able to verify that it was), perhaps that’s why the pilots were so surprised to see something...

I haven't heard this conjecture before. My 3D model suggests that Gimbal was a jet going ~375 knots at ~19,000 feet, and we know it was somewhere over the Atlantic off Florida. People always ask why, if it was a jet, it wasn't identified as one. Do we know for a fact that there was no...

I finally finished up all of the outlier scenarios for the four extended cases of the Gimbal simulation (clouds at 2,000 feet, clouds at 15,250 feet, clouds moving to the right at 100 knots, and clouds moving to the left at 100 knots. All of the basic scenarios are still there; they just get...

Studying motion of the clouds In my altitude study above, I found that a 14-fold increase in the altitude of the clouds results in only a 6% change in the distance to the straight-and-level scenario, and a 14% change in its speed. It turns out, motion of the clouds has even less of an influence...

I can't stop watching this. I wish I had some mushrooms

I noticed a lowering of the clouds. But then I realized my F-18 track wasn't following the curvature of the Earth, so the view was effectively tilting up over time, relative to the surface below. When I corrected for that, the clouds stayed at the same level from beginning to end (which I then...

I'm trying to figure out how I could do this. I think I could stick a very wide panoramic camera on the same bezier curve that the F-18 follows, without any rolling or panning except maybe to keep the clouds still. I’m not sure where the curve in the above video comes from. I assumed it was...

Unless the cloud bank slopes or changes altitude, any change in the camera pitch should result in a change in the cloud level in the frame. So, at least under the assumption of a flat cloud bank, I think we’re locked into the camera tilting up by 0.05° over the course of the video. That could be...

But in that case, the clouds will rise up in the picture. They sink over the coarse of the video, indicating that the object is rising relative to them (from the camera’s perspective). It’s probably pretty safe to assume that the clouds at the beginning and end are at roughly the same altitude.