Description

Browsing through the handful of related threads here, I found other attempts at stabilization, but none that showed the actual isolated movement of the object through the sky as clearly as I had hoped. This post is a quick and dirty effort on my part; it's a tricky one, because the person holding the camera was moving around quite a bit. Someone with more time and patience could achieve a much smoother and more stable version, but this at least gives a little more insight into how the object was behaving. Perhaps someone has indeed created a better version, and I simply failed to find it in the other threads — if so, apologies for the redundancy.

I present the clip at three different speeds: normal, 2x, and 4x. I feel the higher speeds reveal a bit more about the nature of the object's movement. I became momentarily excited by what appeared to be unusual acceleration around :30 seconds in, but I now believe this was simply due to the cameraman stepping to the side while filming. Subjectively speaking, the object does appear to wander in the sky a bit more than I would personally expect from a tethered balloon. However, I am not knowledgeable enough about the movement of balloons to say whether or not the object behaves like one here. In other portions of the video, though, it does seem to behave like a typical balloon.

Anyway, I thought others here might find it interesting.