Three Nights, No Proof

I need to talk about what happened this week. Three nights in a row. Three different equipment failures. Three chances at proof, and I have nothing to show for it.

Night one. Tuesday. Clear skies, cold. I was at The Clearing with the full setup. At 2:14 AM, a bright light appeared low on the horizon, moving erratically—stopping, starting, changing direction. Not like a plane, not like a satellite. I grabbed the camera and hit record.

Battery dead. Full charge when I left the cabin an hour earlier. The battery indicator was still showing three bars when I last checked at 1:50 AM. But dead at 2:14. The cold drains batteries faster, especially older ones. Tennessee January nights can hit single digits. The battery is two years old. This is explainable.

Night two. Wednesday. I brought three fully charged batteries. The light came back at 2:17 AM, same area of sky, same erratic movement. Camera powered on fine. Hit record.

SD card error. The card had been formatted that afternoon. It was a brand new card, bought specifically for this purpose. But the camera threw a write error. I swapped cards—the backup worked, but by the time I got it recording, the light was gone. SD card failure rate on new cards is about 1-2%. Uncommon but not unheard of, especially with off-brand cards in cold weather. I shouldn't have cheaped out.

Night three. Thursday. Three batteries, two SD cards, and I pre-recorded thirty seconds of test footage to confirm everything worked. The light appeared at 2:19 AM. Camera was already rolling.

The manual focus motor seized. Not the electronic override—the physical motor that drives the focus ring. It locked up, leaving the lens focused at infinity when the light was close enough to need a different focal point. The footage shows a beautiful, sharp star field with a blurry blob moving through it.

Three nights. Three different failure modes. The rational explanation: my equipment is old, the conditions are harsh, and I'm running cameras beyond their design specs in freezing humidity. Tennessee winter is hard on electronics. Confirmation bias makes me remember the failures that coincide with events and forget the ones that happen on boring nights.

And that's probably all it is. Bad luck plus old gear plus cold weather.

But three nights in a row? Three different systems? Each one failing at the exact moment something appeared?

I've started borrowing equipment. Newer stuff. A friend in Knoxville is lending me a camera that cost more than my cabin. If night four comes, I'll be ready.

If night four comes, and the borrowed camera fails too... then I'll know it's not the equipment.