Starship Asterisk*

FastArtCeeToo wrote:
Well, I can put the Manning meteor theory to rest.

Yes, you certainly can.

Here is how it measures up. Any further charts, or pictures, or graphical FFT's - and I will suggest you go outside and get some fresh air.

I saw the reference to the Manning meteor in another discussion, and passed it on. I stated that I didn't know how the time/date jibed, and as soon as the facts were pointed out, I discarded the conjecture.

For your information, I have not posted any "charts, or pictures, or graphical FFT's", so your tone is entirely unwarranted.

I *happen* to think that right now the most likely explanation is the flying insect hypothesis, but I have some reservations that I'm trying to work through.

I knew it... Bigfoot DID it while making a crop circle....

FastArtCeeToo wrote:

FastArtCeeToo wrote:
Well, I can put the Manning meteor theory to rest.

Yes, you certainly can.

Here is how it measures up. Any further charts, or pictures, or graphical FFT's - and I will suggest you go outside and get some fresh air.

I saw the reference to the Manning meteor in another discussion, and passed it on. I stated that I didn't know how the time/date jibed, and as soon as the facts were pointed out, I discarded the conjecture.

For your information, I have not posted any "charts, or pictures, or graphical FFT's", so your tone is entirely unwarranted.

I *happen* to think that right now the most likely explanation is the flying insect hypothesis, but I have some reservations that I'm trying to work through.

No, I agree with you. The meteor theory CAN be put to bed. But.... everyone IS ignoring the EASIEST, MOST SIMPLE, MOST LIKELY answer and instead opting for the most convoluted and less than likely answers. Sorry...

Deef wrote:

GL wrote:I did not read all posts but there appears to be a large animal pasturing next to the trees below the white building on the left. It raises its head in the last frame. Did it hear something ?

This is a fascinating and potentially significant find. Here is the location of the movement:

Why the need for snide/ridiculing posts?

I think the object is more likely a vehicle (I don't know), but just because someone gets it wrong, and thinks it might be an animal looking up, why poke fun at him? It would be quite sufficient to reply that it is NOT an animal.

Let's encourage people to inquire and join the discussion, rather than turn them off by making them the butt of jokes.

Stumbled on this site, registered today, got no activation email, but have been following subject on Slashdot & Bad Astronomy.
Suggest:
1 Flash is bulb burning out.
2 Streak is shadow of lamp post/shade/whatever cast UP into sky & made visible because of slight evening mist.
3 Test by flashing bulb again: In my young days we flashed household lights by screwing in a sixpence under the lightbulb & turning it on. But there may be no 6d pieces in Oz any more, or you may need a different coin for this bulb, or a piece of tinfoil/silver paper suitably folded.
Film or video or something, the whole procedure when you turn the power on.
Of course you need friends at powerstation/town/port to turn things on & off. Get the local/countrywide/worldwide media interested if you've not got the right friends. (Have sent several emails to Australian Broadcasting Corporation -- no answer) .
Will also need right weather, same weather as original photo. For this you have to pray.
If get flash & streak QED. If not keep trying till you do. I'm sure you will succeed sooner or later.(I hope)
I see there are Aussies on this site, ones with local knowledge. Give it a shot mates.
G'day & a Merry Xmas & Happy New Year to all.

frustratedtoejam wrote:Flash is bulb burning out.

This has been ruled out on several grounds multiple times in this thread. Reasons include: shadow would be diverging, you can't cast a shadow -- only light. If light were cast sufficient to make the shadow shown, the shadow should be the brightness of the before/after pictures and the rest of the sky should be brighter. That is not the case. Also, the increased brightness should be inversely proportional to the square of the distance. We see uniform lighting. There may be more, but I never seriously considered this a contender, so I never paid attention.

By the way, where is the slashdot site?

Here is a new shot of the sky in Miamisburg Ohio - the guy is walking thru a crop circle-

http://www.earthfiles.com/Images/news/M ... tsJeff.jpg

Here is the full Article. I'm not the Doug in the article by the way. The Page 61 post on this thread has two more different example pictures.

http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm ... nvironment


Anyone see what I'm talking about?

This is a description of a crop circle forming from long time researcher Nancy Talbot, a tube of light ( an energy tube ) is mentioned and you can see the small white star objects.

http://www.rense.com/general17/talbot.htm

I made a diff pic of my own, adjusted the brightness/contrast a little then rotated the "bug" to a horizontal postion. To me it looks just like a honey bee. How about you guys?

I copied and used some digital techniques on the photographs (the “before”, “during”, and “after” the flash). First, I looked at the indicative digital (hidden) data about each photo. First, the “Before” and “After” pictures are reversed. The “before” picture is numbered, 1191995 taken 11/22/04 at 18:53:07 and the “after” pictures is number 1191993 taken 11/22/04 at 18:52:37. Thus, they were reported incorrectly. The picture in question is indeed in the middle, numbered 1191994 taken 11/22/04 at 18:52:52. All three were recorded with a Canon PowerShot G3 camera. As reported by the photographer (above) they were indeed taken 15 seconds apart, 1/20 second exposure, F=5.6. I enhanced and expanded portions of the pictures (about 300 times), placed them all in proper registration and applied better contrast and smoothing to the images. Another contributor asked if the white around the pole was smoke. When the digital photo was enhanced a white smoke cloud does seem to be around the pole in question. Also, the flash does not come from the water and is at the exact top of the pole. The smoke appears from the bottom of the pole to nearly one pole length over the top of the flash. The white smoke skirts symmetrically around the pole from its base up to the red-yellow flash at the top. The white smoke follows the contour of the flash and appears to have drifted slightly to the right (it would be valuable to know if the wind was from the left to right along the water). It looks like the whole pole generated a line of smoke. The pole is exactly the same height as another short pole to the left. That pole has an object (transformer or light) attached to its top. These two poles are both shorter than the larger standing pole that appear to have arrays of lights on them, similar to what is seen at sporting events. Possibly the photograph captured an electrical discharge, the generation of a puff of smoke in the shape of the pole, a flash of light, and shadow across the sky.

Anonymous wrote:Does this look familiar?

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010219.html

Yup. Classic anti-crepuscular ray.

Note how, because of the geometry of the formation of such ray, the shadow 'ray' points towards the sun (back behind the left shoulder of the photographer).

Unfortunately this is not the case in the image we are discussing.

I made a diff pic of my own, adjusted the brightness/contrast a little then rotated the "bug" to a horizontal postion. To me it looks just like a honey bee. How about you guys?

I think that nails it! Nice job! (Gee... I wonder why I didn't think of doing that?)

I officially withdraw my last reservation: It is a bee (or related insect) that just happens to line up with the body of water.

I do believe that the mysterious streak from Australia can be put in the 'solved' column.

Victor: You were right all along.

Oops... I didn't put in my username.

Anonymous wrote:

I made a diff pic of my own, adjusted the brightness/contrast a little then rotated the "bug" to a horizontal postion. To me it looks just like a honey bee. How about you guys?

I think that nails it! Nice job! (Gee... I wonder why I didn't think of doing that?)

I officially withdraw my last reservation: It is a bee (or related insect) that just happens to line up with the body of water.

I do believe that the mysterious streak from Australia can be put in the 'solved' column.

Victor: You were right all along.

MadCadmium wrote:

I made a diff pic of my own, adjusted the brightness/contrast a little then rotated the "bug" to a horizontal postion. To me it looks just like a honey bee. How about you guys?

Cool. Now we just have to explain why the bee was doing a barrel roll combined with an outside loop at the time the pic was taken and we're home free! Maybe the flash freaked her out.

Seriously though, bees have two pairs of wings but when in flight a little set of 'hooks ' joins the trailing edge of the front pair to the leading edge of the rear pair, effectively acting as one pair of wings. Insects generally twist their wings (especially the tips) in flight to create little vortices that help generate lift. This means that the wing does not have the same angle all along its legth, so a reflection from a wing would not be an all or nothing proposition.

Doug Huffman wrote:Anyone see what I'm talking about?

No.

Yes you would be close to the mark on the Honey bee. Behind the photoghraphers position is two large trees both heavily in flower, one is a type of fig maybe a banyan to the left and 30ft high and the other is a bushapple about 20ft high directly behind. the main bugs passing this position of an evening are termites but the honey bee is a more likely candidate. They are common in Darwin as they are all round the world.
The foreground in the photo hides a fifty foot cliff of soft porcelanite rock having many nooks and crannys for the bees to nest in. Bees always return to their hive before dark. Great shots wheelman, you have proved to me that this is indeed a bug, after initial doubts. Keep up the good work guys. [/quote]

Wanted to post this source in case anyone is interested- this is not a bee by the way. There is a large flash that is separate from a long odd white smoke formation as big as the entire lamp post-with a cup shape at it's center- the event happens somewhere beyond the pole quite a distance from the camera- the event flash & shaded straight tube appear to be at least as big as a lamp post head in width if not bigger. If you have the courage to consider the star object (above the flash in the high def pictures) as anything but a stuck pixel then this is an incredible event with the straight ( vacuum? energy channel) tube extending into the sky. At the very least a meteor with unexplained phenomenon going on.

" downed wheat after blasts of pale blue light
in field the night before. "
source for picture of "chrome spheres" Post page 61
http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm ... nvironment

From time-to-time, I have noticed similar streaks as those in the initial photo. I normally don't pay much attention to them, because there is nothing more one can learn about them than what one sees. However, several years ago, one of these streaks struck a finger of my hand. I wrote about the experience in my online autobiography. I will summarize here what happened:

I was standing outside, a few feet away from a small, rock-lined trash pit that my family used to burn our garbage on our property. It was a cold day, and I was waiting for the trash to burn. Suddenly, there was a streak that appeared for an instant in front of me. At the same moment, I felt a sting in my finger and a muffled "pop," like that of a glass jar breaking from heat, coming from the burn pit.

My initial impression was that some small object had zipped down from the sky in a straight line and hit my finger. The streak had come from above me, about a 20 degree elevation, past the limits of my peripheral vision. The stinging in my finger was strong, no less than if a bee had stung me. Yet, there was no visible sign of injury to my finger. I had expected blood, or, at least, a cut. The sore area may have reddened, but it did not look like an obvious wound.

I later considered that someone might be able to explain away my experience as simply some glass that had exploded in the burn pit. Such an explanation would be inconsistent with my observations, but I wanted to see if I could find a likely glass object in the burn pit, so, a few days after the encounter, I made a search for a possible object. I could not find any glass jar or anything else that should have made that sound. My theory at that point was that the sound I heard was that of a rock in the ground fracturing as it was hit, just as my finger had stung when my finger was hit.

Within a few days of the encounter, a callous began to form where I had been stung. The callous grew larger for several weeks. I don't remember when it eventually went away, but I think it lasted for a year or two.

MadCadmium wrote:To me it looks just like a honey bee. How about you guys?

That little fellow should be nominated for an Oscar, I think. He makes single appearance of 0.05 seconds and the world's in shock - well some of us. This is an outstanding performance. But we need to name him. How about the Gee-Bee?

Navigation is not that easy here so if you missed and don't want to go back- see the big high def here, straight up from flash well above middle of the sky there is a white star object sitting in the blue band of hortizontal cloud closest to us just before the sky turns pink directly over the event, you can run a ruler straight up from the flash into the sky and you can make it out looks like a star compare with my post last page.
Its in all three big pictures( before and after too). We've had the stuck pixel idea that can't be proved and there are no other comparable stuck pixels in the entire set of 3 shots- the pink thing lower left our side in water is a sparkle of sunlight I suggested.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/ ... de_big.jpg

geon wrote:It could very well be a hair/dust on the lens.
Or, at a shutter speed of 1/20s, it could be an insect flying by.

This was the 7th post on this thread and the first to mention the possibility of a flying insect.

FastArtCeeToo wrote:Well, I can put the Manning meteor theory to rest.

Yes, I erred in saying the Darwin event was 39 hours after the Manning meteor. I knew the pictures were around 6pm and Dec 7 [Pearl Harbor] but that was the day they went up as APOD. Looking at the camera data they were shot on 22Nov2004, two weeks before the Manning event.

It looks like sunset and light is bouncing all around between breaks in the clouds. It's just a fluke where light has filtered through breaks in the clouds and then bounced off a reflecting cloud (reflecting it up again at an angle. Next, a particularly dense small cloud (or edge/tip of a cloud) is causing the shadow -- the rest of the "backdrop" clouds are light by ambient diffuse light.

Wonder if the odd shape of the smoke is a clue. Seems whatever it was may have snagged the back of the lamp post right side top then triggered the flash while pushing the smoke out as we view it with a distinctive bow shape resulting- most if not all of the smoke is behind the pole and is totally separated from flash, see the cup shape made at the center of smoke, the rest of the smoke forms a line the cup shape sits in. I'll maintain that the smoke is bigger than the pole in length and wider than the pole in width.

The Flare is bigger more intense than one would expect from a lamp but maybe some force seen as the shaded tube triggered the lamp to burn itself out in an instant releasing smoke caught by the wind bowing the smoke outward noticeably only where the shaded applied force hit and gave it a extra push. The smoke and flash are about at the lamp heads position. Viewing this in stereo 3D might help resolve this position question and maybe size- that is two slides of the same photo placed in a Stereo viewer- like a toy called a Viewmaster.

Anyway see how the dark tube is the same width as the sideways u shape in what appears as to be fine white smoke.

When I study the bush in the foreground, I have a hard time believing that the flash actually went off. The bush does not appear to be much more than ten feet away, and yet there is no evidence of either flash shadows or reflective highlights on the bush. I see no evidence of fill light. Look especially at the leaf located at 602,1619. There is a shadow laying across it from the bunch of leaves above it. The light source appears to me to be diffuse and from the sky. At f5.6, and at ten feet, I would expect to see some fill in there, at the very least.

I'll send questions to the Canon person tomorrow (Sat, US time), but given the weekend I expect not to hear anything back until Monday.

JJ

the burnout/exploding bulb seems to make the most sense to me
however, shouldn't a shadow created by a bulb exploding very near its housing create a shadow that gets wider the farther it gets from the source?