Strange streak discussion: 2004 Dec 7 APOD

[smith-at-canada-com]

As the original poster of the "blowing light bulb casts shadow" theory (page 1), I done a little more reading and thinking.

Remember, simple is best.

For this given area, light bulbs likely burn out at sunset more frequently that meteors arrive.

However, bugs fly around more often than light bulbs burn out.

Now, although the "light bulb" theory explains the flash and the shadow, I now think it has two problems. First, it does not explain the odd, yet distinct structure of the flash itself. Second, the amount of energy needed to cast that level of shadow over such a distance makes be nervous.

The bug explanation (especially some of the enhanced photos) give a good explanation of the flash -- camera flash bouncing off the body and wings of a bug. However, the streak is VERY straight, and I've never seen an insect fly like that.

However, the bug trail could actually be a shadow -- I mention this back around page 7, I think -- essentially there is a low level of reflection of the flash from moisture in the air, EXCEPT where the shadow of the bug falls from the camera flash.

This can only be explained, however, if the camera is upside down, since the shadow is up and to the left.

If the camera is upside down, then the bug theory is simplest and best.

[Argiris]

My guess is that the camera was set to take pictures on timer, so the lens was pointed at the sun for an extended period. You can see that the streak goes west, towards the setting sun. To me, it appears that the CCD on the camera has taken some damage from the sun being focused on the ccd for a prolonged period. As you know, these cameras do not have a flip mirror, so the sensor is always exposed to the lens. Other people have sustained permanent damage to their CCDs (see for example http://www.harbortronics.com/faq.htm#ds2000-11 ).

My guess is that this ccd was damaged and the defect will show up again on shots with specific exposure time/brightness, especially on bright days/subjects that require short accumulation time.

Argiris

[markos]

I have a simular picture from a river -it was a hole of no light
around `bright sun light` [from a thick/dense cloud]

satcommunitfive@yahoo.com.au if you want a copy

ps its really a death ray

[rippleone]

I noticed something interesting when I looked very closely at the light pole in question by going "frame-by-frame".

First I looked at the before picture, then the after picture - I noticed that the top of the pole is different in the two views. Zoom in an see it...

In the after shot, the pole seems to be surrounded by a faint haze like a puff of smoke. Presumably, this is the remains of the flashing explosion which seems to originate from the top of the post. Another observation...

In the flash frame, if you look to the right and below the top of the pole where the flash is located, you will see a white whispy-ness. In the after picture, I noticed - ever so faintly - that there seemed to be a trail of "smoke" off further to the right and lower to the ground than this previous bright whisp. I think these may be the remnants of a lamp blowout, etc falling to the ground.

As for the darkened line extending to the upper left in the flash frame, I can only speculate. But it seems to me that given the available info that it's a shadow cast in humid air from the bright flash.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Matthew Lowry
Lake Forest High School
Lake Forest, IL

Attention everyone. If you look farther down the wharf to the next vertical beam, which is about 1/4th as tall as the light post you will notice that it gets shorter from the before frame. It's as if about 1/3rd of it has been cut off by something traveling at high velocity. If you draw a line right through the contrail and the flash and then all the way to the wharf you will see what I am talikng about. This thing (meteorite) not only hits the light post but also the other pole to the right of it. Those that were investigating the light post probably never walked further down the wharf where they could have found a very small pucture or maybe even an impact in the wharf were the grain of sand size meteorite hit.

[DC]

The image I just posted also doesn't support the idea of light from the flare reflecting off the lampposts. I think the apparent reflections, clearer in other images, show them to be just JPG compressions artifacts.

Also, I don't see you can do a mph calculation from the length of the trail and the 1/20 second exposure, because the trail could have been formed in the previous 15 seconds.

[s.]

This is the Finger Of God; I'd recognize her ugly index finger anywhere. She clearly had a beef with the light pole and thought no-one was looking. So much for being omnipresent.

s.

[Cloudbait]

Well, lots of interesting discussion, some reasonable, some silly. My own opinion (as a meteor researcher) is that a meteorite is the least likely explanation (well, except for black holes, time wrinkles, etc). Most likely is still a bug. I've summarized my thoughts about the different ideas at http://www.cloudbait.com/science/darwin.html

[Andy F.]

I found two strange objects in the photo. 1) There is a bright white object floating just above the surface of the water in the lower left. I can also see what appears to be shadow just beneath it. 2) There is some kind of "orb" in the sky directly above the flash. I scaled up the pic and increased contrast to get a better look. See the enhanced detail pics at http://www.imageprosinc.com/dev/strange/index.html

[Guest]

It appears to be a sun shadow from a low altitude cloud.

K. Talley
SAIC

[Trillium]

The lamp will emit a flash of X-rays as it is burning out. The X-rays will slightly fog the CCD in the camera since they are not focused by the camera lens. The filament support structure or part of the filament itself cast an X-ray shadow on the camera, not in the sky. The bright arc looks like a distorted and magnified image of the filament itself. This arc may be in the UV spectrum since the camera lens did some focusing.

Experiment: Put a 12V high intensity bulb (Tensor) in a dark room. Point a camera at it with shutter open. Hit the bulb with 120V. It would be better to do this with a mercury or sodium vapor lamp but they are tougher to blow on command.

This is not the most likely scenario but something to think about and testable.

[Dave Parkhurst]

It looks very similar to a phenomenon we see regularly up here in Alaska. First of all the lighting on the upper clouds appears to be made from the sun setting behind the photographer and striking higher clouds at the time of the exposure. Without seeing what was actually in the open sky behind the photographer, my guess is that a single small cloud mass was visible in a small opening and created a single anti-crepuscular ray or shadow cascading down opposite the sunset. There are times in Alaska we can see anywhere from one or two crepuscular or anti-crepuscular rays or even hundreds of rays at a time. It is not uncommon to see only one ray at a time, as cloud formation depicts.

Dave Parkhurst
Alaska Naturally
auroracollection@alaska.com
http://www.TheAlaskaCollection.com

[Guest]

Here is what happens to a car with a long exposure time and a flash:
http://www.photographic.com/phototechni ... ndex4.html

Here is another mystery bug picture – lots of commentary on how bugs can cause this effect:
http://www.forteantimes.com/exclusive/rods2.shtml

Its a firefly zipping past very close to the lens.

Just in case anyone thinks this is true, there are no fireflies in Australia so far as I know.

[leomichael]

Clearly it is an alien vessel moving across the sky in a straight line. The line would be caused by particle exhaust from the ships thrusters. Given that the species is vastly superior to ours, you would expect their exhaust to be a clean environmental product, which explains the disappearance of the streak in the next moment.

Glad to have been of service.

[acelightning]

Some people have theorized that it was an insect, or a strand of hair, or some other foreign body passing across the camera's field during the exposure. Others have postulated that it is an artifact of the shutter, or the lens, or the CCD. But if it's any of those things... how could it have passed BEHIND the mast or lamp-post? The vertical post is very clearly between the explosion/shockwave/whatever and the camera.

[Cyb3rflaw]

Should we be looking for LGM?

[Guest]

Glad to see that they keep ruling out the meteorite theory, but for some reason nobody can truly state what happened at Tunguska? Why can't this be a similar incident, only smaller and over water?

[Quinkin]

How about storm sprites, elves, blue jets and the like? I believe it was a fairly large storm system (the main prerequisite) and we understand so little of how and why they occur let alone whether there are "down sprites" of some form or another (ie. not 1-40 kms wide).

Transionospheric pulses, Schumann resonances etc. all seem to be related to the capacitive coupling between the ground and the ionosphere. I cant help looking at the "bug wings" and thinking of plasma.

I remember watching stars on the Nullabor Plains many years ago and identifying 3 distinct forms of motion. Slow satellites reflecting sunlight, medium speed "standard" meteors, and other tiny flashes of light that were gone before you could register them. These high speed motes sometimes left a quite straight tracer lightly inscribed on your vision, but the majority seemed to scribe circular to spiral traces.

The worlds a wacky place... I hope it is something far more interesting than a bug.

Quinkin.

[Guest]

More fuel on the fire, here are the photos i took of the area today around 12:30 local. I couldn't find the exact spot the photos were taken from but these should give you some different angles of the things you are looking at.

Please mirror them quickly because i'm on limited bandwidth, so i'll take them down shortly.

About 1MB each.

http://www.samhaddow.com/things/1.jpg
http://www.samhaddow.com/things/2.jpg
http://www.samhaddow.com/things/3.jpg
http://www.samhaddow.com/things/4.jpg
http://www.samhaddow.com/things/5.jpg
http://www.samhaddow.com/things/6.jpg
http://www.samhaddow.com/things/7.jpg

[Cloudbait]

Glad to see that they keep ruling out the meteorite theory, but for some reason nobody can truly state what happened at Tunguska? Why can't this be a similar incident, only smaller and over water?

Precisely because of the size. Small objects, say under a meter, which are traveling at several km/s, experience deceleration forces of several hundred G once they get down to 30km height or so. This is greater than their material strength, and they rupture into smaller pieces which rapidly slow down. For something to actually rupture very close to the ground, or to hit the ground with a cosmic velocity, it will have been ~10 meters across when it first entered, and will have produced some dramatic effects all the way down. Tunguska-like events are presumably caused by objects that are 10s of meters in diameter. If every small meteorite was traveling at kilometers per second on impact, we wouldn't have dented cars and small holes in roofs- we'd have craters.

[NoseyNick]

This is clearly the trail of Santa's Sleigh, out on a practice run. The flash on the lamp post is a magical discharge similar to the sparkle you'll see on presents as they are delivered.

[wl_sprague]

Once when I was out camping along a river, at night, I saw a ball follow the course of the river. It appeared to be on fire and about as big as half the size of a VW Bug. It lit the entire site up. I didn't see any impact and as far as I could tell, it just kept following the course of the river, which I thought strange. But this site was also very near a military installation, and I don't even pretnd to know what they may be experimenting with. I'm not one of those big UFO theory buffs, I personally have no opinion on that issue.

This image reminds me of that event in my life. The streak almost looks like the residuals of smoke. The object itself is the interesting thing to me. From this picture it almost looks like a meteorite, but I would almost expect it to have some damage to the pole it is behind if it was.

Are there any military installations close by? Also...were you able to get any kind of scale of the object that appears to be crashing into the water? The object I saw passed in front of a large tree on the opposite side of the river. That gave it some scale. This one, however, seems far enough away from any other objects to make it questionable how big it is. It also could be quite small, just very bright.

At this point though the only thing I can say about it is this...the best guess, without any other evidence available, would be that it was a small meteorite...just large enough to actually be clasified as a meteorite.

Interesting picture. I think you're very fortunate to have been around to take it.

[Lee]

Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words is right.

To the guest who posted the 7 closer shots of the area:
I'm looking at shots 3, 4, and 5 and I think I've established where you are relative to the strange_pryde shot. In the strange_pryde shot, there were 8 very tall, equidistant poles (probably light poles) that extends way above the black "track" or "ramp" that stretches across the area. The pole with the mysterious spark is just before the very last TALL light pole. I don't see any poles in those closer shots that could be these TALL light poles. Were they to the left of all these shots?

Lee

[Guest]

Does anyone recall the tragic incident of a Boeing 747 that was lost with all on board a few years ago somewhere off New York, the one that was ultimately determined to be some kind of airconditioning issue? At the time, there was some sensationalist reporting that it might have been shot down by a missile. All of this was based on a snapshot taken by a "member of the public" that had a blurred something that was interpreted by "the media" as this alleged missile. I'm thinking that this blurred missile, whatever it ultimately was, LOOKED similar to this dark blur. Does this strike any resonances with anyone?

[Mori]

The Australian strake is not alone. On the internet, we can find a photo of another mysterious strake, in double, from San Francisco, 1977:
http://www.perspectivas.com.mx/noticias ... /07/streak
That San Francisco double strake seems to be just a problem on the print, if not a hoax, but it's very similar in appearance to the Australian one.

[Can't use my Bad Buoy]

I'm still with a fantastic shot of a meteorite strike and the sonic shockwave being overtaken by the explosion's round compression wave, both accented with a small amount of condensation and the water polarized twilight.

This object was most likely a small, dense metal meteorite as evidenced by its speed which survived the peak pressures of atmospheric entry. It's chimney [smoke trail] being such a whisp gives evidence to both its speed and lack of combustion.

Its trajectory is consistent with this photo and note the discussion of that photo sounds much like the one here. Those who believe they should see more of an arc do not realize how large a meteor's arc is, and as we're almost directly in its path, what arc exists is not apparent.

Those who believe it should be in almost vertical freefall are based in their experience of recoverable [ie. VERY slow] meteorites.

This article describes sonic booms accompanying meteorites of relatively low velocity.

P.S. The pole this side of the explosive terminus has NOTHING to do with the event, as close inspection showed the next day. Besides, the light fixtures of that row of lights appear slightly to the left of the poles, not the right.