Starship Asterisk*

Why is this photo even being presented at APOD? What does this photo have anything to do with astronomy? I'm really surprised at APOD for posting this photo and then asking people what it is? Like anykind of scientific conclusion could be made. All of the answers posted are a possibility to what this photo shows. A very little amount of data has been given to make a proper analysis and conslusion.

In the article you meantioned that the glass beads found were used for sandblasting. I have seen similar beads placed into the wet paint when road lines are created to make them reflective. Glass beads never fade so their reflectivity lasts a very long time. Cool article. Thanks for the challenge!

-G

ave you considered the the camera may have caught the brilliant flash from the light bulb burning out and the the streak is an artifact of that in the camera lens?

It might be worth a check to see if there was a satellite in the area equipted with a lazer. Of course no country would admit to such a thing! I feel that there have been many tries to develop such satellites. Good hunting! Cliff Moore

Two things are strange to my opinion, if this was an extraterrestrial piece of dust or rock : the streak seems curved, which is impossible at velocities of about 30,000 km/h ; the streak fades towards the left of the photo, which is strange, again because of the high speed : the time elapsed between the point where the supposed meteor comes in view, and the actual impact on the pole, is very short indeed. The distance is no more than say 200 m. Therefore, within a time of only 24 msec. Why does the trail of dust fades within this very short time ?

JC, Netherlands

The streak is darker than its enviroment. So the object ought to be black, darker than its environment.
Checking the Streak with a ruler shows, that the streak is not completely linear, it is tilted a bit like a ballistic pathway -> something massive has fallen down. At a high speed, because of the only light curvature, and with enough kinetic energy to ionisize water molecules.
No more ideas.

nt

It's the shadow of a con trail. I've seen 'em before.

I wrote:

The "meteor tube" is the shadow of the light fixture (illuminated by the true light source) projected into the haze.

I should have written:

The "meteor tube" is the shadow of the light fixture (illuminated by the REFLECTION of the true light source) projected into the haze. The effect is similar to contrail shadows often seen in "clear" air.

Doug Kniffen

I've taken digital photographs for years now, and though the flash looks legitimate, the "streak" looks like an artifact from overexposure on the CCD (charge coupled device), or the actual surface that collects light information to make the digital picture. If I saw this photograph with no mention of the streak, I would assume that the streak was such an unremarkable artifact and think no more of it.

I agree with the writter who thinks it might be a hair on the lens.

Looks like three things were aligned by chance:
1. A contrail shadow
2. The flash of the streetlight luminaire bulb as it turned on in the twilight and burned out
3. Smoke from an engine starting on the pier or on a ship behind the pier.

i personally don't understand why we have a photograph of light that shows simulatenously the explosion and i guess debree from the explosion

All right, here it is...
The camera caught the explosion of the lightbulb at just the right moment. The posts look like the kind in parking lots where they point downward (sometimes at an angle). The dark line is the shadow of the deflector above the lightbulb. The light goes in all directions except where the deflector blocks it. Just like how flashlights direct their light. Thus, it explains why the explosion fans out at a right angle on either side of the line because the deflector is doing that, deflecting the explosion sideways. The dark line is caused because the extra light enters the camera and lights up the whole view except where the deflector blocks it. Understand? Its kinda hard to explain, but I think I did my best at it.

Has anyone tried using a simple photo editing program such as Microsoft Photo?

I used the "negative" function and the streak turns much darker and ends just down from the upper left corner of the photo.

If you look at the other poles of the same size, it appears that the flash is not near anything mounter on the pole, but that it may be out in the middle of the water behind the pole.

The smoke seems to be going both up and down the poles length.

It would be interesting if someone could dive in the water and look for new objects on the sea bed.

What is the exact position of the sun in relation to the streak? This would most likely help to confirm its being a shadow of some kind.

An aircraft or even a flock of birds momentarily passing between the sun (especially if the sun is partially obscured by clouds such that the presenting sun is fairly small) could cause a temporary shadow to be cast in the atmosphere.

It is obvious that the cause of the streak was a temporary condition.

A meteor entering the earth's atmosphere during daylight, especially if the path of the meteor were not visible from the location of the photographer, could momentarily cast a shadowy image from the setting sun far from the atmospheric entry point of the meteor.

It is just a shutter artifact from crud in the camera reflecting light, the shadow line is flat on the picture plain with no change in width.
Try doing an image calc by taking the diff of each RGB for before during and after shots then you can see that the line and the "flash" is internal to the camera.

Dan.
http://dan.3-e.net

My guess:

Cosmic particle at the correct, yet unlikely angle across the face of the CCD sensor. The particle shorted out (discharged) the charge in the CCD sensor locations it already traveled across, and then finally stopped and lost energy where the flash in the image is presented. It may explain the "smoke" as electronics were cast out from some sensor locations to others near where the particle was stopped.

Doesn't explain everything, but after a contrail first came to mind, this was the second thing. Perhaps I am FAR off base here, but it perhaps is a possibility.

What does a CCD do on board a spacecraft? Show light spots or dark ones from cosmic particles?

-LS (aka Mark W.)

I think a it's reflection from the water directed up into air that has been caught in rising water vapor, I've seen this before in Scotland where light and shdaow play many tricks upon the lochs when the suns at the right angle.

Notice that the streak seems to start at the edge of a cloud and end at the land in the distance, not at the light pole.
To me this rules out an artifact in either a chemical or digital camera.
The shadow of a contrail theory seems the best to me.
Ted

The first question to ask is, what angle was the sun at?
While a lot of these hypothesis sound valid, I havent heard one exploring the possibilty of a sunbeam peeking through cloud from the right, splashing off the water beyond the pole, being partially obstructed by something in the water, and that same something casting its shadow up from the water in the reflected sunbeam. Looking at the sunlight on the clouds in the distance, the angle might possibly be wrong for this....

Here are my impressions of the strike:

First off, there are at least two and possibly three layers of clouds in the picture, which to my mind rules out a contrail shadow. Note also the relative positions of the shadows on the ground and the somewhat overexposed cloud at the top of the picture -- both would indicate that the sun is somewhere around 1 o'clock (at the top of the picture and a bit to the left). No noise is mentioned in the report of the story, thus if there was a jet it'd have to be flying pretty high and probably to the right of the cloud at the top of the picture. There are too many variables for that to be a contrail, and I'd think the photographer would have mentioned any obvious sources for the streak.

Second, look at the flash area. The white smoke coming off the object (whether it was the lightpost or something behind it) has a very distinctive pattern -- a bulge in the middle and then two relatively straight trails above and below. The whole arrangement is also tilted at an angle almost exactly perpendicular to the streak in the photo. I think it's fair to say that whatever caused the smoke came at the end of the trail, as their correlation is again a bit much to be a coincidence. As I see it, it also looks as if the smoke from the blast is behind the light post, but it's hard to tell because of the faintness of the photo whether or not we're looking through the smoke to the post. It's certainly not a ground strike, as the smoke profile isn't indicative of a limiting force from below. The half-circle shape and the symmetry suggest to me that the explosion is happening in the air, and I also believe that there is some structure behind where the blast occured -- this would explain both the buldge and the fact that it isn't a perfect sphere or circle.

Now that I think about it, that would be a bit odd because it would indicate that if this was a meteor, it passed through something solid and the exploded on the other side of that something, as opposed to striking, say, the top of the post. Or it could be, for instance, that a very small particle entered the top of the light (or went through something that wasn't as solid as the rest of fixture) then blew through the back of it, and the smoke was produced when the particle exited the fixture rather than entered it.

Whatever happened, I think the key to figuring it out is to determine how that smoke profile was made.

Probably a lucky shot of a meteor. Ionized trail up and to the left, splash in the back-ground. Whisp of smoke in near ground is not releated.

The EXIF information from the files looks legit. The order of the photos is reversed (they really go "strangeafter, strange, strangebefore") but that's no big deal. The EXIF info backs up the claim that the photos were taken 15 seconds apart. Movement of the clouds is consistent with this, also.

The sizes of the three files are very similar. If this were a fake I'd expect that whatever program re-encoded the JPEG would probably use slightly different parameters, making the file size different. I'd also expect a program re-encoding the file would mess with the EXIF info, or at least add a comment indicating what program it was.

So, based on all this, I'm reasonably confident we can rule out a fake. Either that or the the forger pays excellent attention to detail!

Okay, so it's likely not a Photoshop job. What is it? I kind of like the lens flare theory. I can't tell if the flash was fired or not (all three photos each have two conflicting entries in their EXIF info). I think a lens flare could account for the white "smoke" around the light, which looks very symmetric around the axis of the line.

I'd like to know more about the geometry of the CCD array itself. I've sometimes seen vertical streaks from a bright point in my own digital pictures, which I attribute to some flaw in the CCD. Is it possible that the camera's CCD is such that a bright point could make a diagonal line? The streak appears to be about 34 degrees off of horizontal. If so, this could be a mere bright reflection in the water.

Whatever it is, I think it's more likely to be some sort of artifact of the camera than an image of anything real.

well, after reading all 20 pages of posts here, i'd like to add something that was mentioned only once or twice and expand on it a bit.

What really happened here, is the sun for just a quick moment peeked out from behind the clouds and reflected off the top of the fixture on the light post.

just so happened the camera was in the right place to snap a picture of this reflection. The reflection wouldn't need to be instant, but with all the clouds in the sky it only happened for a second. The reddish color of the "explosion" is close in color to the sunlight in other parts of the picture.

The dark "streak" and "smoke" are artifacts caused by the reflection. These could not have been seen by anyone.