Balloons?
Monday, 17th September 2007 by James Turnbull
Please note that some or all of the objects mentioned in this post are no longer visible on Google Earth or Google Maps.
High above the Uvas Reservoir in Santa Clara County, it looks like there's hundreds of colourful balloons floating up into the sky.
The possible balloons are unfortunately on the overlap of two images, but appear to be rising up from the beach on the South-Eastern tip of the island.
Helium balloons can reach anywhere between 2000 and 6000 metres in height1, but whether or not that would be high enough to make them so visible on a satellite photograph is unclear.
So it's over to you readers: could this be a large balloon release captured from space?
Thanks: Vaudesir
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Eventually they will burst and the plastic will fall back to Earth, where it will probably kill our wildlife ↩︎
Kill our wildlife? Maybe we should tell the Alliance for climate protection…
You think they’d know better eh?
I think.. in order to make such a balloon appear twice as large as it is, you’d have to halve it’s distance to the satellite. But those ballons seem to be as large as cars, so you’d have to halve the distance many times over and over again. So they would have to be very near to the satellite. The next question would be: Wouldn’t those baloons be way out of focus then?
It’s posts like THIS ONE that keep me coming back to GSS.
Well i havent seen this on GE so i couldnt measure it but if its as big as a car would it be more possible for them to be hot air balloons or some of those sorts?
Not all images on google come from satellite. Many of the higher resolution images are from airplanes (The flyover Australia for example). The balloons could be close if this image was taken from an airplane.
Novolo’s hot air balloon is likely as well.
Or what we are seeing may not be balloons at all but some diverse alien species.
@Nova: I keep meaning to make this into an FAQ: Yes, the more detailed Google Earth data is from aerial photography, but if you see “© DigitalGlobe” in the bottom right then it is definitely a satellite picture, taken by DigitalGlobe’s Quickbird satellite.
As an aside, I just read that DigitalGlobe are about to launch a new higher resolution satellite into space, called WorldView I. You can even watch the launch online.
The size of the ‘balloons’ in GE are 3 to 4 meters. A hot air balloon is ~20 meters wide, so this is not an option.
Who says these are in the sky? Couldn’t they be objects floating on the water?
A Christo installation perhaps?
I would love to believe that this is balloons because its a great image but they are not uniform enough in size and there doesnt seem to be enough human activity round and about (athough there may have been in the ‘overlap’). I also dont believe satellite photographs can detect such a wide dynamic range of colour from long distances which makes me think its some sort of reflection/ aberration. A quick Google reveals they have Tri-athlons in the lake so may have something to do with that maybe? Not pretending i know what this is and it is indeed intriguing. Just offering an opinion.
They certainly are intriguing: very different is size and color, and none as far as I can see over land. The balloon opinion is backed up by the shape they make – look very much like a release in the wind, the way they spread out, and the way they come from that point of land. Too many I think to be anything airbourne that is more disposable than a baloon.. however, find it hard to believe they would pick up that well – I’m sure we’d be seeing loads of low flying objects if we can see a 25 cm baloon that well?
Would spectrum refracted light reflections off the water interest anyone?
Maybe they were working on Google sky, and accidentally used some star field in the regular maps. because they look like some sort of deep field view.
I too would like to buy into the ‘spectrum refracted light reflections off the water’ theory but i would counter it by saying that you would think we would see this more often.
It looks like whatever they are are coming from the tip of the island but actually, it seems they are coming from a different part of the island (more north). The tip of the island that is aligned with the starting point doesn’t seem to come from the same image to me but I might be wrong.
It’s a nice idea, but given that the “balloons” appear on a bad join between two images, isn’t it more likely they are an artefact of the imaging process?
The size indicated by the GE ruler may be totally out of whack if they are indeed balloons and they are in mid air, because GE also gives their altitude as 141m: the same as the surface of the water. GE tends to do that with anything that is not attached to the ground, even planes that are obviously a lot bigger than balloons.
Maybe they’re just really big balloons… Car dealerships sometimes have large tethered balloons over their lot. Not one has ever made me want to go buy a car, and I don’t know what anyone would be doing with that many balloons of that size, but anything’s possible. Here’s one idea. These could be mylar balloons that are reflecting the sun back at the satellite, making them appear brighter and possibly larger. Could someone have spilled nerds candy on the image? We’ve had bugs and tape before, not to mention single planes turned into formations…
They MIGHT be foil balloons … like you can get for any kid’s party. The glare of the sun reflecting off the shiny surface could explain the apparent size and also the different colors. Think someone pointing a mirror up at the satellite…
It could be something as simple as sparkles in the water getting amplified and distorted due to image processing. If you tilt the view in Google earth it looks like that is where waves might form as a result of wind.
Perhaps someone sneezed on the lens…
It’s CLEARLY another advert for Sony Plasma TVs.
Oh it’s just pixie dust that stuck to some condensation on the lens. Happens alla time.
the closest clearing where it would be likely for a balloon release to come from is a quarter mile from the stitch. It is probable that any balloons launched from there would be very high by this point.
Seen here: https://www.googlesightseeing.com/2006/04/25/frankfurt-plane-shadows/ is four shots of an airliner taking off. Tracking it’s apparent size as it grows closest to the camera, it appears to “grow” fairly quickly as it ascends. Between that and the low-res imagery that blurs the edges of these phenomena I would say balloons are a very likely possibility. Rubber balloons that they launch by the trillions here in the states every f*ck the wildlife day (second and third Thurs. of every month).
Didier said: “GE also gives their altitude as 141m: the same as the surface of the water. GE tends to do that with anything that is not attached to the ground, even planes that are obviously a lot bigger than balloons.”
Of course it would – GE isn’t magically detecting the altitude of any feature on the image, it is just using the known height of each location on the earth from the topographical model.
But I am not convinced by James’s insistence that this is definitely a satellite image, regardless of the copyright image. It certainly looks like aerial photography to me – you can see the jump from aerial photo to satellite image between the seventh and eight notch of the zoom slider. This is especially noticeable in the imagery immediately to the north, which seems higher-resolution but is still labelled DigitalGlobe.
If the Ballons gain height the air preasure starts to fall. So the internal preasuer of the ballons force the Ballon to grow bigger.
This explains why the ballons on the right side are bigger ten on the left because their gaining mor height, less air pressure and mor size.
Just an idea, it really makes an difference. Weatherballons are planed to explode at great height to drop the sensors. I saw an documentation that explains that Weatherballons are housebig at real big heights. On ground they have 1 meter.
It’s sun glinting off the surface of the lake. The imagery is 2005 2-meter resolution California NAIP imagery, you can download the entire dataset online. In the non-cut off version, it’s pretty clear it’s just water reflection because it gets very heavy over the lake.
Do you have a link for that image?
i have been able to zoom into 8m above the ground… wouldent that meen those would be easely visible?
its not there anymore,the image is not there both of them are not there,sorry.
Check out Google Earth and go to Dec 30, 2005. If those are balloons, there sure are alot of them. in the part of the picture you couldn’t see before.