Strange streak discussion: 2004 Dec 7 APOD

[wombat]

Can't resist this. A bee flies into a bar and says to the bartender: "What's the buzz?" Yeah, yeah, you all saw that coming; go ahead and flame away.

[Leyshon]

That should read:

"I DO believe that it was fired from an aircraft several kilometers away"

[Guest]

Dear Leyshon:


It might be helpful to combine your thoughts with two others
along these same lines, wombat and Engineer in Canada, for
clarity, into one larger, incoherent paragraph:

"The easiest thing to say is the complex appearance is due to
warping of the insect wings under load, so that they are non-planar,
and hence giveunususal reflections. I see a parallel in the argument
hoax theory, in that could probably take almost any arbitrary wing
shape, bend it into something reasonable according to wingbeat
phase, flight load ect; thenorient the insect, camera, and flash so
as to get exacly what we see here. The light is thus refracted due to smoke and looks like it might be sparks which is impossible because sparks don't have a pattern to the, they flyall over the place, and
nothing is being ejected under or to the left of the pole, it looks
pretty homogenious with a heavier light concertration at the light
and a more disperse still homogenious above the light bulb of the
pole. Now I'm convinced that this a United States military weapons
demonstration if its new microwave weapons capabilities. The
microwave weapon would be used many towards the disruption
of electrical devices."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[victorengel]

You did very well to find an actual photo with the right ambient/flash lighting.

I looked on pbase.com, which has mostly very good pictures by professional and serious amateur photographers. I happened to know there are some excellent insect pictures there, and it was just a matter of choosing a good one.

But Victor, haven't you just contradicted yourself here? Yes, the wings attach to the thorax, which is my semi-circle. You can see the attachment point quite clearly. The yellow blob is then the abdomen. The bee is much more head-on in the anomalous image than it is in your photo.

Where have I contradicted myself?

What causes me trouble is the arc semi-circling the yellow blob to the right, from say 2 o'clock to 6 o'clock. This to me at least looks "real"; ie, doesn't look like a jpeg artifact. It certainly is on the various processed images. I have great difficulty in seeing this arc as belonging to the main spars. I mean the arc meets the long wings at ninety degrees; this seems too extreme to be modelled by just one pair of wings, no matter how you contort your fan blades.

What makes you think the 2 to 6 oclock pattern is wings? To my eye, that looks more like the fuzzy portion around a bee's thorax.

I was referring here to the arc semi-circling the yellow blob. So, just to clarify, I see the more saturated yellow blob as being either the abdomen or head, and the less saturated portion to which the wings connect, the thorax. I'm more inclined to believe the yellow blob is the abdomen than the head because of the relative sizes. Unclear, is whether the insect is flying toward or away from the camera.

[Leyshon]

Guest, I'm completely serious.

My theory is neither ridicules, nor implausible.

Dismissing an outright photographic fraud....the simplest explaination for this event is a microwave weapon beam.

And I don't believe it a fraud.

My proof is cannot be communicated.
It consist of this photo, plus dozens of articles, plus intuition.....this connection of widely gathered...seemingly unconnected snippits of facts.

These are the tools of "forecasters" by the way.
No...not "psychics"...."forecasters"..... the most talented sort of which governments around the world seek and consider critical to employ.

[Boldra]

Guest, I'm completely serious.

Leyshon, you're completely bonkers. Take a break from looking up miliary theories on the net and go for a walk. Play with a dog or something.

The first problem with your theory is that the dark streak does not extend to the edge of the picture.

The second problem is the plausibility of a weapon which does no actual damage.

Finally, perhaps you should try to consider just how much darker a column of polarized air ought to be, and why.

Really, I'm serious about the dog.

Boldra

[Guest]

The first problem with your theory is that the dark streak does not extend to the edge of the picture.

The polarizing effect could be different above the much brighter ocean.
By the way....if the photo was fraudulent, why would the perp. leave that gap ?

The second problem is the plausibility of a weapon which does no actual damage.

Use my link. the microwave weapon doesn't burn holes in things. It heats thing up in it absorbtion range and knocks electrons loose in electronic circuitry. This current flow distrupt and/or destroys circuits.
For instance......it can overload and MELT the filament of a lightbulb without destroying its housing !!!

[Leyshon]

Sorry....the previous post was written by Leyshon

[Leyshon]

The second problem is the plausibility of a weapon which does no actual damage

As I mentioned...this demostration was meant to showcase our targeting capabilities only.
Let our competitors (*cough* china) guess at our energy ranges.

I suspect this beam delivered around 2000 watts of energy.

[nohsyel]

Guest, I'm completely serious.
My theory is neither ridicules, nor implausible.

Perhaps not ridicules but definitely ridiculous.

My proof is cannot be communicated.

Why is that, are the big words too difficult?

It consist of this photo, plus dozens of articles, plus intuition.....this connection of widely gathered...seemingly unconnected snippits of facts.

What a beautiful mind you have.

These are the tools of "forecasters" by the way.
No...not "psychics"...."forecasters"..... the most talented sort of which governments around the world seek and consider critical to employ.

Would that be Meteorologists?

[Sol.]

The first problem with your theory is that the dark streak does not extend to the edge of the picture.

The polarizing effect could be different above the much brighter ocean.
By the way....if the photo was fraudulent, why would the perp. leave that gap ?

That gap is very significant because it refutes or casts doubt on most hypotheses offered so far, including the hoax hypothesis, as you point out, but also on your microwave beam theory. How, exactly, could the "polarizing effect... be different above the much brighter ocean?"

But there's another "gap" that needs to be explained by any credible hypothesis: the one at the other end, if you assume that the flash is the light bulb exploding. That would be in mid-air; why would the microwave beam stop right there instead of continuing to the dock, since the "beam" is clearly much wider than the bulb?

Anyway, there's yet another feature that needs to be explained, which causes serious problems for most of the theories (including yours and the hoax theory): the dark streak is not perfectly straight. It has a shallow "S" curve, turning very slightly up on the left end and slightly down on the end near the flash. That's easy to explain if it's an insect; how does a microwave beam do that?

Or, if it's a hoax, why is it so close to being straight, but not as straight as a masking tool would make it? What, precisely, was the photographer trying to hoax? If the photographer was trying to hoax a motion-blurred insect shot with a long exposure and a flash, he did an absolutely marvelous job, with the flash being a stroke of pure creative genius.

[victorengel]

I decided to try to do some enhancements of the path including using Neatimage to remove as much noise as possible. I was particularly interested in trying to enhance any periodic elements in the path. One thing I notice right away is that the overall picture has a pattern that's roughly the same frequency as the alleged flapping frequency. This, to me, casts doubt on the idea that the path fitting statistics given several pages ago actually correspond to flappings of an insect. Instead, I think what's being detected is this overall very low frequency noise.


Unfortunately, I did not record the steps I used to create this image. Perhaps later when I get more time, I'll try to duplicate it while logging what I do. In general, though, I used Paintshop Pro to first, average before and after pictures. I then subtracted this from the event picture with a bias of 128. Then I used Neatimage to get rid of the noise. Then I used histogram/curves adjustments to enhance the shape of the path.

[DC]

I don't know what has been going on lately. Victor's streak image in the previous post looks interesting. I tried to invent an edge detector once with no useful results. The following images are what I have been coming up with lately. I'll get back later with some explanations.

[wbt]

Could this be a good example of "ball" lightning? I've seen this before, somewhere in a science article.

[notbob]

I decided to try to do some enhancements of the path including using Neatimage to remove as much noise as possible. I was particularly interested in trying to enhance any periodic elements in the path. One thing I notice right away is that the overall picture has a pattern that's roughly the same frequency as the alleged flapping frequency. This, to me, casts doubt on the idea that the path fitting statistics given several pages ago actually correspond to flappings of an insect. Instead, I think what's being detected is this overall very low frequency noise.

Victorengel after following a great deal of discussion you have finally almost made a bug believer out of me with this image. I have analysed thousands of difference images and I like this one a lot. Keep up the good work.

DC only god knows what you're up to with those images.

[wombat]

Hey Luis! You still there? How's the observing going? Figured out how to use that scope? Didja have a look at the moon? Found the Orion nebula yet? Wot about the comet?

[DC]

DC only god knows what you're up to with those images.

Good question. I'm trying to find a way to bring out any hidden details in the event image that might help explain what it is. It is clear to me that whatever caused the most visible details also created a few more subtle details.

In the first row I am labeling the most obvious details as A1, A2, A3, and B1. Bug theorists might say A1, A2 and A3 are wing reflections while B1 is a reflection off the yellow insect body.

In the second and third row of images I am using a color filter to look for additional features, which I label as A4, A5, and B2. Bug theorists could say A4 might be a reflection of a moving wingtip, while a reflection along the length of the wing is what created A3. The blue spot I am labelling A5 seems to be where a JPG artifact meets the A1 and A2 features. The B2 feature is a similar yellow color as B1 and is attached to it. Could this be a wing cover?

The fourth row of images is an attempt to determine how the colors changed in the diff images, and bring out features without using the color filters. The interesting thing is that where the bluish A4 feature and the yellowish B2 feature cross each other, the color differences with the background (before or after) images cancel each other out, yet the color of each feature is apparent beyond the crossing point. This would be consistent with a stationary yellow wing cover being crossed by a reflective wingtip as the wing flaps.

The last two rows of images show another feature which I am labelling C. In the diff images, there are some pixels that get darker in comparison with the before/after images, suggesting that if this is an insect, there was a non reflective part of the insect blocking the light when compared with the before/after images. The location of those pixels getting darker is shown in the first two images on the bottom row. I found if I added back 12% of the background light (from before/after) to a diff image which otherwise would clip out the negative values, those negative values are shown as the dark feature I have labelled C. But then if this feature was created by a moving insect, why is the C feature not blurred? I have enhanced several images on the next to the last row to show the C feature more clearly, and to show it crosses the boundaries of several JPG artifacts.

I have a lot of similar images I could post which show the same thing a bit more clearly by comparison. This is just a collection of the more interesting images.

[Guest]

I agree with notbob. But I was alredy convinced. Victorengel has
managed to put up a conclusive presentation through all the clutter.
On the other hand, I'm dissapointed. The absurd and ridiculous posts
that provide the best material will now just fade away.

There is some hope, though, that the die-hards will hang in there:

"I (DC) don't know what has been going on lately..." ... but, instead
of catching up on the posts, I'll just bang my head against the wall
for a while, and you tell me if anything interesting comes out.

Yes, there is hope.

[Dolphindov]

Possibly a lightning fireball; but then, it'd have to travel straight. Interesting, for no one ever documented a strait line that goes all the way to (rather from) that leftish altostratus, possibly 14000 feet up ... that'd make a 30000 feet line?

Keep in mind that we do see two cumulonimbus, a rather small one to the left and the other one possibly a mesoscale.

Still, an improbable theory.

What are the time exposure ? Film, Diaphragm, time of day, month. Orientation, (azimut), winds???

After more observation, my best shot:

1/ A jet vapor shadow, with the trail invisible, toward the sun is to the upper right.

2/ At the same time, a post light exploding. ( or simply burning with the "mist" being the smoke of a passing low boat.)

[Guest]

Die-hard Dolphidov: how quickly I was proved wrong. This thing is
going to be like a hundred-year coal fire.

[DC]

I agree with notbob. But I was alredy convinced. Victorengel has managed to put up a conclusive presentation through all the clutter. On the other hand, I'm dissapointed. The absurd and ridiculous posts that provide the best material will now just fade away.

There is some hope, though, that the die-hards will hang in there:

"I (DC) don't know what has been going on lately..." ... but, instead
of catching up on the posts, I'll just bang my head against the wall
for a while, and you tell me if anything interesting comes out.

Yes, there is hope.

The only real thing available to work with is the original images. If you don't pay close attention to those, you can confidently come to any conclusion you want.

[Guest]

There are hundreds of post here dealing with the original images, and
perhaps thousands of hours spent on their analysis. Looking them over
might save you from reinventing the wheel.

[tndude]

Didn't I read on APOD that the most likely cause for the streak and fireball was an insect flying by? It occurred to me that a possibility that I have not seen posted (but I admit I haven't read all 135 replies made to date) is that the picture was taken on film and later converted to a digital image. The film could have been flawed or affected in some way during the development process. I've seen similar bright patches like the explosion in pictures I've taken...with pictures on either side being unaffected. Now there may be some obvious reasons why this cannot explain the mystery: it is known that it was taken with a digital camera or one can tell the difference whether a digitized image originated electronically? I don't know. But it certainly makes more sense to me than an insect flying by at close range.

[Leyshon]

I have a bad habit of not bothering to edit my posts so I'll accept nohsyel's ridicule, but none of that furthers this investigation at hand, does it ?

Anyhow, I think victerengel's enhancements settle the "gap" question.
There is no gap at the end.
What I meant before was that the brightness of the ocean behind the beam, bleached out the polarizing effect.
The apparent gap at the left extreme of the beam is probably due to some optical effect of the cameras lens.

I think that shock wave effect seen around the lamphead is the final proof of a micro wave beam weapon.

Place some metallic object into your microwave and study the fireworks...briefly.

The timing is too perfect.
I'm convinced more than ever this was all a set up.
Oh, the photographer can't be contacted ?
No kidding. If he's NSA he's gone....a ghost.

You can resist the evidence in front of you but I would guess that our competitors around the world have no doubts and have recieved the message loud and clear.

Relatedly, anyone following the news of laserbeams hitting the inside of commercial jet's cockpits. This while the jet is at speed, flying at 8500 ft. !
A steady targeting lasting several seconds.
This is quite an acomplishment in itself.

[makc]

Okay... To end up this discussion, I've made an image where you can actually see the bee itself, but it seems victorengel was first to achieve this level of quality for bee shape...

Here are steps to re-produce image:

1. mix 50/50 before-after image, and filter it (Gaussian blur, 0.5 pix)
2. apply S-shaped Curves transform to bright-up bee (result)
3. put the result on top and swith to "lighter" layer mode (to remove lots of jpeg artifacts)
4. merge it with underlying layer copy to get it back to "normal"
5. now put the layer in the difference mode. it will be mostly too black to see anything, but don't be scared
6. select near-pitch-black color range (preview ON, GrayScale)

voila - there the bee is.