How to Observe & Report Well
A short field method for turning 'I saw something' into a report investigators can actually use.
Tell-tale sign
Good reports capture time, direction, elevation, and duration precisely — and rule out the obvious causes before concluding 'unknown.'
Capture the essentials
Record the exact date and clock time (and your time zone), and how long the event lasted. Duration alone separates a meteor (a second), an aircraft (minutes), and a planet (hours).
Fix the direction and height. Direction is a compass bearing — N, NE, E, and so on. Height above the horizon is measured in degrees: a fist held at arm's length is about 10°, straight up is 90°. 'Low in the west, about two fists up' is far more useful than 'over there.'
Describe motion and appearance plainly
Say what it did in ordinary terms: steady or blinking, silent or noisy, one light or many, holding still or crossing the sky, and in which direction it moved. Note color and whether it changed.
Compare it to references: brighter or fainter than the brightest star? Bigger or smaller than the Moon held at arm's length? Concrete comparisons beat adjectives.
Get evidence and rule out the usual causes
If you film it, brace the camera against something solid and keep a fixed foreground object (a rooftop, tree, pole) in frame — that fixed reference is what lets anyone judge real motion later. Record several steady seconds rather than a shaky zoom.
Before filing, check the common explanations for that time and place: satellites and Starlink, bright planets, aircraft and drones, lanterns, and camera artifacts. This platform's Identify tool runs those checks for you. Ruling them out is what makes a genuine unknown credible.
File a clean report
Submit with your location, the time, the direction and elevation, the duration, and your plain-language description — plus any steady video. Note what you already ruled out.
A precise, honest report that says 'here's what I saw and here's what it wasn't' is worth far more to the archive than a dramatic one.