An award-winning astro-photographer from Canberra has captured an incredible image of an object in the night sky, which moved west to east for about 10 minutes before disappearing.

An internationally well-respected photographer (he recently judged one of the world’s most prominent photography events), Ari Rex has spent the past 10 years documenting our night sky for 20 days of each month from February to October.

On Friday 14 July at about 8pm, during a photoshoot far away from city light pollution near Gundaroo, Ari and five clients witnessed – and documented – an object in the night sky that he couldn’t explain. A possible explanation is that India’s space agency launched a rocket into orbit around the same time.  

“Clients came to my night photography workshop, I was showing them the Milky Way and the regions of the sky,” Ari says. “As I was tracking, I’m looking at this white thing and I thought ‘okay, it’s a little cloud coming from the north west’. As I was moving, I was keeping an eye on it … I thought ‘what is that? That’s strange.’ I could see that it was moving.

“It looked like there was something in it because of its form. It was moving from north-west to north-east, then it disappeared. There is a last shot where there’s a little bit of dust behind the tree, the last bit of it.”

Ari says the object appeared in the sky for no more than 10 minutes and he is certain it wasn’t a cloud.

“This is the first time that I’ve seen something like this. I’ve seen many things in the sky,” he says. “My time-lapse has a lot of things going on in them; if it was a plane it would be a red light or any light – this one didn’t have any lights. You see meteors, satellites, the [International Space Station] – they are more like a straight line; they look like stars.”

Ari has been closely following the recent hearings in US Congress, where a former military intelligence officer claimed Congress had been kept in the dark about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP or UFO).

Ari says “If I don’t see it there, who else is going to see it? People are watching TV; my TV is there”.

When Ari photographed the object, his camera had a wide-angle lens fitted so he captured the whole sky (this image has been cropped). Due to the camera’s exposure setting, Ari says the object appears slightly elongated. “Exactly what you see there is more or less what I saw with my naked eye.”

When Ari does astro-photography (he also conducts Milky Way photography workshops in the ACT), he takes up to 10 cameras to map the entire sky using time lapse. By day, Ari is a commercial photographer.

See more of Ari’s astro-photography on Instagram @arirex1 or visit www.arirex.com.au