Starship Asterisk*

Guest wrote:To all those who think it's a bug --

do you see any variation in intensity to either side of the dark line that would represent the bug wings?

in other words, I note that the thickness of the dark line is very close to the thickness of the "bug body" in the "explosion." but where are the wings in the dark line?

I would suspect that the wings are fairly transparent or at least translucent and wouldve block muhc of the light behind it?

skyglow1

I wish this forum had a spellchecker built in.

Could someone post an online poll somewhere where we all could take a vote on this and get some statistics?

Voting options:
1) Contrail shadow
2) Light exploding
3) Meteor
4) CCD artifact
5) Bug
6) Flash artifact
7) Lightning
8) Lens artifact
9) Write-in candidate

Hoax and film artifact are not reasonable here so they're not eligible candidates (we're all assuming it's not a hoax).

...

Here's my opnion:

#1 is out since the sun is in the wrong place. #2 is out since if you look closely it's not a light but a ship mast-- the lights have hoods on them.

#3 and #7 are out since many experts have indicated their opinion and I would trust them. I also think we would have more anecdotal evidence if something fantastic had occured. #4 is out-- I just haven't seen any CCD artifacts like that. #8 seems unlikely-- not in center and not curved.

The only other plausible explanations remaining are #5 and #6. From reading everything here my vote is so far for #5-- the image LOOKS like a bug! It is possible that a bug flying across the exposure somehow caused less light to reach the camera in its flight path, causing a slightly darker image on average.

"When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Sherlock Holmes

http://www.bcpl.net/~lmoskowi/HolmesQuo ... ction.html

Regards,

Dan

Guest wrote:To all those who think it's a bug --

do you see any variation in intensity to either side of the dark line that would represent the bug wings?

in other words, I note that the thickness of the dark line is very close to the thickness of the "bug body" in the "explosion." but where are the wings in the dark line?

During that part of the exposure, the camera strobe is not active, so the wings would be illuminated only from behind. Since they're transparent, you don't see anything when they're blurred. At the very least, anything you do see has an amplitude less than the noise in the photo.

It seems to me that there are only 2 theories that seem to hold water.

(disregarding the Hoax theory, which is a catchall and no fun at all.)

1) The exploding lamp + shadow of housing

2) out-of-focus bug flying in front of view.

I hate to admit it because I'm a fan of explosions, but the bug theory is starting to grow on me.

I'm not convinced that a bug can travel that far in 1/20 of a second - unless it's REALLY close to the camera - and if it were that close, wouldn't the trail be wider? Unless the bug was very small... ok, I'm talking myself into circles.

Until someone can claim more than "the light was not working" and more like "the bulb was missing and glass was found on the ground around the area", I'm going to have to side with the bug theory being the most plausable - as much as it pains me to do so.

If there was still a bulb in the lamp - "burned out" as opposed to "destroyed", then explosion would definately be out of the question.

I will hang on by my fingernails to the "exploding lamp" theory untill there is proof to the contrary, but I can't just call the bug folks "stupid". The theory holds.

I will do my best to punch a hole in the bug theory, but I'm not sure how yet.

-Flip

First of all, I’d like to refute the “Bug Hypotheses”.
1. The shadow is straight line – generating a line with any photo editing program will eliminate the illusion of an arcing path.
2. It is just too coincidental that the line intersects the light flash.
3. If the insect were to have crossed the field of view, it would have been pretty darn close to the lens. You can calculate velocities at increasing distances from the lens if you want – remember, shutter speed is 1/20.

Secondly, I feel that there is no room within the scientific community for unsubstantiated conspiracy “theories”.

Thirdly, a meteor would have drawn enough attention to substantiate such an event. Besides, what is the statistical probability that a meteor would strike a lamppost at the exact time of exposure without breaking the bulb inside?

I can’t argue for or against the “Contrail Hypotheses” except that the only ones I’ve seen are above cloud base and this one does not appear to extend into the blue skyin the upper left hand corner.

Anyway, here’s what I think. The camera simply caught the the bright flash of a light bulb in the act of burning out. The shadow and related aura around the flash are simply photographic anomalies produced by the camera during exposure.

But, hey -- what do I know? I just want to get my geology degree in the spring!!

Anonymous wrote:
2. It is just too coincidental that the line intersects the light flash.
3. If the insect were to have crossed the field of view, it would have been pretty darn close to the lens. You can calculate velocities at increasing distances from the lens if you want – remember, shutter speed is 1/20.
!

#2: The flash is the bug illuminated by the flash from the camera. As has already been discussed

#3: Those calculations have already been done on a previous page.

My first thought was that it was a contrail, like many have said, but that was before I saw the flashing light post.

Also, on closer inspection, it does not have some of the requirements needed in order to se the shadow of a contrail. In order to see the shadow of a contrail, your eyes must be along the same line as the contrail and the light source (the sun ), then the sun projects a plane defined by the contrail. If you look the same direction of the contrail then you see the shaddow, if you are driving you hardly see them because they come and go so quickly. I once was flying a small Cessna and was following a contrail shaddow for a few minutes. It is truely a bizzare experience. But in this picture, in order to have that, since the line goes top left to bottom right, and the sun cannot be at the bottom right, it must be at the top left. Although you can't actually see the sun, the visual ques of the clouds illuminated from the right, and the building in along the shore illuminated also from the right would indicate that the sun is towards the right. Which would rule out the contrail shadow as a possibility.

Of the other options I have read on this forum, the Ionization trail sounds good, but do these trails travel in such a striaght line?

I think I like the light burning out idea the best and the line is a shadow reflected off the moisture in the air? I don't know All very good ideas.

But I have to step down from my first contrail assumption.

-paul billock

In my opinion (and I stated it before) the hypothesis of an exploding lamp (or any other source of light) is not possible because if a flash from the exploding lamp would be strong enough to produce a shadow that long, than that flash would make the photo much brighter then the before and after photos, because all 3 photos where taken with the same aperture and exposition time. As can be seen, all 3 photos have roughly the same brightness with the streak being darker then the same areas on the other 2 photos.

Can any experts on photography comment this?

PS: I’m trying to do my best to write in correct English, but this is not my primary language…

My PC just went nuts and I had to re-boot---was watching discussion on Australian streak---anyone else having a problem?

Moderator, could you e-mail me at: frap@hawaii.rr.com---thanks

redxeth wrote:#1 is out since the sun is in the wrong place. #2 is out since if you look closely it's not a light but a ship mast-- the lights have hoods on them.

Look at a close up of the "before" photo – it seems to have a hood on it, it is just a slightly different perspective so the hood lines up with the pole. It would be too much of a coincidence for a yacht mast to be exactly the same height as the light posts.

Flip wrote:I'm not convinced that a bug can travel that far in 1/20 of a second - unless it's REALLY close to the camera - and if it were that close, wouldn't the trail be wider? Unless the bug was very small... ok, I'm talking myself into circles.

Calculations of bug speed & size are on: http://asterisk.apod.com/vie ... &start=456

Hawaiianmike, you are like a dog with a bone! I’m not sure what boat you are referring to… what can be seen behind the Iron Ore Wharf is the Fort Hill Wharf. Look at the maps and aerial photo linked to in this link. http://asterisk.apod.com/vie ... &start=456

I converted all three images to tiff format. Then, using pixel math, I
1- Took the average of the before and after images.
2- Subtracted the result of 1, above, from the image showing the hit.
3- I "stretched" the result of 2, above, wth the black level at 0 and the white level at 3000. I then converted this back to jpg format with 70% compression.

You can see the result at:
http://tjpstewart.org/images/Hit-minus- ... ess-70.jpg


The result of 3 appears to show that the upper left terminus of the dark streak is much more definite than it appears in the unprocessed "hit" image.

Terry Stewart

haw3aiianmike wrote:
Hey, all you BUG people---why isn't the trail visible below the rear of the boat, on water, if it's a bug?? What, it flew out of the flash? If it's supposed to be so close to the lens, then where is the continuation on the bottom?

The image captues the bug during the entire 1/20th second exposure. Either the flash was at the very beginning of the exposure and the bug flew up and to the left or the flash was at the very end of the exposure and the bug flew down and to the right. If the exposure were longer, the track would have been longer.

Go here to see some work I did on sorting out a sense of scale for this debate. I think the 'bug' theory is up in smoke, if you'll pardon the jab.
http://homepage.mac.com/b.a.freeman/Dar ... bum14.html

Far more likely -- but boring -- is a distant pole, perhaps a hundred yards beyond the foreground pipes/conveyor/whatever in a loading dock area.

What may be a very simple explanation is a utility pole shorting out, followed by a very bright flash of light and smoke which would of course wash out any part of an image shot at 1/20 and f4 to f5.6., resulting in a big white smudge we see here.

That same too-bright light would likely cause the algorithm for the digital sensor to make some heavy adjustments to the likely result: lens flare. This could easily be represented as a dark, purple-ish line we see here. It comes from the light out, not the other way around. Think of how often you've seen dark bands emanating downward from the sun over some storm clouds. I think we're seeing it here from a short-lived "artificial sun".
Also remember the bright area may already have been burning when the shutter opened! He (Mr Pryde) was looking up at the clouds and might easily not have noticed until he saw the pictures at home.

He's using a tripod for the camera (all 3 images are movementless, relative to the shore), so he didn't need to compose for each shot; he was just waiting 15 seconds and then would trip the shutter again.

For comparison sake among the non-photographers: Consider that a daytime shot of your pal might be 1/500 or 1/125 at f5.6 (ISO ~200 speed film/sensor setting) on a brightly overcast day.

Since our intrepid Mr Pryde was essentially shooting the clouds and darkening sky, he was exposing for them -- to capture the colors and gradations of clouds -- rather than exposing for the land, which is why the land area is in silhouette.

Cheers,
Brett.

My opinion is that the streak has been caused by a flaw or temporary speck on the lens which has caught the bright light of the sun. The dark streak exists because it has "burned in" on the digital camera element. Please note the arc and hollow circle near the bright spot of light at the lightpole. This isn't something in the distance, it is something occurring to and within the camera optics.

Brett, I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you think your pictures have proved? What about those pictures makes the bug theory go up in smoke, or proves any other theory?

Hawaiianmike, the "flash" is reflected light caused by the camera flash lighting up the bug, in particular the abdomen and thorax. The smoky bits are the bug's translucent wings. The streak is the bug moving through the frame prior to the camera's flash going off. Because the wings are translucent, and beating too fast to see, they don't show up as part of the streak, though they were briefly captured by the camera flash.

To everyone else - try flapping your hand as fast as you can. Notice how you can see through it?

I know this is rehashing previous posts, but I thought I'd try to summarise and use simple terms. To the entos out there - sorry to use the term "bug" I know you must cringe every time someone uses that word. For the lay-people, a bug is a very specific type of insect. A fly or bee is not a bug.

Brett wrote:Go here to see some work I did on sorting out a sense of scale for this debate. I think the 'bug' theory is up in smoke, if you'll pardon the jab.
http://homepage.mac.com/b.a.freeman/Dar ... bum14.html

What are you talking about? The bug is very close to the camera. It is not 8 feet wide and flying at hundreds of feet per second. The total bug trail it a few cm at most. There's nothing on your page or the linked slide show which even mentions bugs.

OK, after looking at the image in photoshop the linear artifact is way too linear to be caused by the flight of the "bug". This doesn't eliminate the bug theory.

The linear artifact MUST be caused by some sort of shadow!!!

Also, I'm revising my previous conclusion that the light pole is really a ship mast-- after looking at the image further I see that there were two kinds of light poles.

Still, I don't think it's caused by an exploding light bulb. That would explain the flash but not the shadow.

Another possibility.

If you enlarge all three images, there is an anomaly in each of them. Looking at the 2 poles to the left of the one with the light burst and below them, you can clearly see what appears to be a lighted rectangle. The top is a very clear delineation in the mist of the trees. The left side of the rectangle almost appears to be a distorted face (but could simply be my imagination).

The only thing I can atribute this to is possibly a reflrection. If the camera was behind glass, could something else like a cigarette cause a reflection with a halo around it and smoke and cast a shadow ?

Just fuel for the fire!

I didn't mean to pick up my flamethrower; I just meant to point out that, based on more easily observable, rather mundane phenomena -- like arcing light-poles or workmen leaning ladders against live-wires in industrial areas, etc. -- that the probability that this is a bug requires more Ifs and Ands and Thens than the more straightforward and, frankly, more likely explanation.

I don't believe bugs don't sometimes get in the way of images, causing strange side-effects. I just don't believe this is a case of that happenstance. Even at this relatively low resolution in the larger original image, to me, a puff of smoke and a bright lightsource in line with a utility pole spells out the fairly obvious.

Also, being an avid photographer tells me from experience that the line observed in the image is likely a failure of the device. Film and digital sensors only have a 4 stop range (avg). The brightest part of the cloud and the bright-spot are already well beyond that range, so they show as "pure-white only". Nothing surprising. The 'smoke' is lit by that same light source and renders fairly accurately as a bluish-white puff we typically observe as, well, smoke.

If you look at the image of the port area where this light pole actually is, its *very* far from the camera, but still consistent size-wise, with a utility pole arcing or burning out.

If this was a bug, relatively close to the camera, anywhere within say 10-15ft but perhaps as far as 20ft, the flash which everybody is going on about would have caught it "within useful range" for a consumer camera such as this Canon and your bug would be a cleanly described, if not terribly in-focus, nicely frozen image, in front of the rest of the shot, since in ~1000/sec it would not move very far at all!

Beyond that distance it would be very unlikely to show up on the image AT ALL because of the slow exposure; it would have passed through the frame entirely undetected!

All this and what we all know about bugs: They tend to fly erratically. It keeps them alive longer that way. If this bug is so close that its path appears straight, the flash should have caught it. If its so far away that the flash didn't get it, its very unlikely this bug would have flown an arrow straight trajectory!

In my view, the logic stacks up to easily against it being a bug/insect.

Again, I didn't mean to be rude, my apologies if it came across that way.

Where is the poll? My vote: it's obviously an insect. Nothing else makes any sense to me.