Slashdot Mirror
A Strange Streak Imaged in Australia
Koyaanisqatsi writes "Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day presents a challenge worthy of a large audience: as it says, "Meteor experts don't think it's a meteor. Atmospheric scientists don't think it's lightning". An intriguing dark streak and bright flash that defies explanation showed up on some cloud monitoring pictures. The forumsetup to discuss it is currently hosed, so perhaps fellow slashdotters can shed some light over the mystery?"
someone drooling icecream over his freshly made photograph!
but when this pic surfaced the first time, people speculated that the flat trajectory meant it had to be a tiny meteorite, with the flash resulting from the rock hitting a street light. a 1 in a billion photo, I imagine.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Seriously, it just looks like the guy needs to clean his camera lens to me.
That tiny rocket from Krypton preparing to crash land on that old coot Kent's farm!
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
I for one welcome our new bright flash overlords.
The photoshop of nature has a bug. Stop wondering and get back to work now.
I welcome our New Death Weapon Overlords.
Obviously this is a new death weapon shot from space
j/k
no god is good
*Place tin foil hat on head*
Nothing like the real thing, the atomosphere.
I, for one, welcome our new streaking overlords...
, or is it a plane.....no its superman
and hes going back in time to develop stem cell research.
It had to have been something in the development process. IANAFD (I am not a film developer) Could the film have been somehow kinked? I can't buy the fact that it is a freak astronomical event, even though it must have peaked enough people's interests to make it to NASA's picture of the day.
I'd say round paintbrush, 20 pixels, black with 10% opacity.
Either that or he needs to clean his camera lens.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Don't be alarmed. Okay, panic a little if your get your water from there.
It would have nice if it was pointed out in advance just where we were supposed to have been looking!
My web domain.
A poor Photoshop job?
--- Ban humanity.
Heh, this should have been a slashdot poll... What is the mysterious object in the picture?
1) part of the ISS that fell off.
2) a meteor
3) a meteorite (to troll the astronomy experts who will have to chime in and explain the difference)
4) the opening salvo of an alien invasion
5) Santa's sleigh
6) Cowboyneal's private jet
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
it's underdog
Looks like a dirty camera lens to me ;-)
Looked like a big cloud to me - then I saw what I thought was dirt on my monitor but it turns out that that is what I am supposed to be looking at.
Koyaanisqatsi was the title of the 1983 film which has the prophecy:
"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster. Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky. A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans."
for any sort of natural phenomenon. It suggests a photographic artifact of some sort. Is the flash definitely related? It certainly appears to be coming from the end of what the APoD caption identifies as a light pole, which is not working. Could it have failed with a sudden flash? Could it coincidentally have occurred at the same time as the streak artifact?
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
...And then they discovered they had some dirt on their lens.
"There are 10 types of people in this world--Those that understand binary, and those that do not..."
Somebody call the Russians and ask them kindly if they still have all their satellites on the sky.
Can't the person who took this photo just walk up and take a few pictures of that light post that seems to have been struck by something?
It's a now flying shark with a "laser"!
I'll get you Dr. Evil!
--Good morning fellas; Hand me that thing; Boy, this work's hard; Guys, break's over.
Possibly the exhaust trail from a Surface-to-Air Missle?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Fireworks? What are the time intervals between the 3 photos?
UBU
Sunlight. Or sunlight reflecting on the cloud.
It is a bird coming in from the upper left behind the camera. If you look at the point where the line intersects the light pole you can see the birds blurry outline. Since the shot was taken in low light the shutter was open long enough that a fast moving bird would cause a a line like that.
Perhaps examining the light pole that appears to have been hit would provide a clue? Did anyone do that?
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
i cant resist...i for one welcome our new straking overlords
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
That was me.
I was trying out my new death-ray. I had it miscalibrated so that you could see it.
Don't worry about it. When death comes and strikes from the heavens for real, it'll be completely invisible.
-Ming the Merciless
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Test firing of a new satellite based EMP.
It was a laser guided, satellite launched micro-missle which was targeted on OBL who was found to be hiding in Australia. That flash is all that was left of him.
The pic before/after this one don't show OBL on the pier because he was hiding in the water underneath it.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Photoshop something that ends up on the slashdot main page - difficulty astronomical! Still no cure for cancer.
If you zoom in on the "impact" you can clearly see Gen. Ackbar's head.
I'd say it's probably something on the lens.
I was let down pretty hard by the character graphics on WoW - much too cartoony compared to EQ et. al. for my taste.
I'll clean up after myself next time. Promise.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Death ray.
Let us all bow our heads in silence as we remember these small but brave travelers.
"The forum setup to discuss it is currently hosed, so perhaps fellow slashdotters can shed some light over the mystery?" ...or perhaps a those fellow slashdotters can help with the hosing, 'cause now I imagine their poor server is suffering under weight of all that is mighty, the "Slashdot Effect", and the forum is currently firehosed...
It's fireworks!
Bababoowie! Bababoowie! Howard Stern's penis! All your little streaks in the sky are belong to us!
I for one kneel before our new little-streaks-from-the-sky overlords!
Hey, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these little streaks! Wouldn't that be a powerful computer?
IT, IS, and MIS people suck. They're overblown tech school dropouts who are finally realizing their worth in this econo
That solution is the solution to a different 'challenge' APOD, not to the dark streak in the current picture.
Actually that is the answer for a previous question they posted.
Nasa's worldwind (here on slashdot a while back) shows some mighty funny objects in the australian sky. Could well be the same things, whatever they are.
What amazing lucky! The streak may have existed for a few seconds only and the photographer have shooted it. Is this really serious?
Ummm...yeah... A solution to a totally different question. You didn't read EITHER article, impressive.
Geez...
This is the smaller Alien Spaceship 0.5 crashing to earth. Combined with the earlier slashdot story about robots and gundams, I expect to see Valkyries in production any time now...
What I don't understand is how the "flash" at the end of the streak is so clean of an image. Even with crazy f/stop settings and an ISO equiv of 400 - I would imagine a picture in that light would have to have a shutter speed of at most 1/30th of a second, more than enough time to cause blur even to a slowly moving object. Am I off base here?
I love APOD. I go there daily. My main problem with APOD is the mass reusing of pictures without any way of knowing if the "picture of the day" is a duplicate or not.
:-)
Yes I tried contacting the APOD maintainers as indicated in this previous APOD slashdot story
Animoog.org
Aircraft parts fall off.
Aircraft toilets malfunction.
Has the light pole been checked for bacteria?
Most of the vital parts on an aircraft are built by the lowest bidder.
This is from the September 13th APOD. Not the December 5th APOD.
Thanks for playing.
Steve
The light pole was not damaged, but the light inside it was not working. It looks to me like there was either some grime on the lens or a freak problem with developing the film (if indeed it was a film camera), right at the moment that the light bult went out. (You do realize that normal light bulbs go out with a bright flash, although I admit they tend to be more blue than the photo.) The two incidents (photo imperfection/light bulb burn out) may very likely have been a freak chance.
bah!
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Didn't you see the little silver De Lorean Gull Wing disappear just before the little flash? I suspect it was using about 1.21 Gigawatts of power at that moment...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
If you get a bubble on the file during processing you'll get a bright spot with a streak if the film wasn't agitated enough. Though it doesn't quite look like that since I seem to remember a dark annular ring around those. Could be some sort of contaminating substance affecting the developement with the streak caused by mechanical squeeging of the film, those it's an odd direction to squeegee in.
That's not the solution to this image. However, it is the solution to the APOD from September 13th which can be seen at: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040913.html
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
From the article:
Images taken just before and after the above frame show no streak or flash. The light pole near the flash has been inspected and does not show any damage, although the light inside was not working.
Can we reasonably say that it was just a light bulb blowing off? Streak? Boy, for sure when I get a bright lamp in the frame I have all kinds of streaks going off it on the picture. So - I'd say it's either an optical or digicam artifact caused by the flash.
Read better. That's the solution to this APOD.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
It's the GoldenEye!
Looks odd to me. Is a straight line on a photo going to be a flat trajectory (even near the edges of the photo)? I would have thought it was a problem with the film.
It's clearly swamp gas being reflected off of a lower thermal atmospheric level, illuminated by Mars. There is nothing to see here, move along. The only real thing I can think of is that it is something in front of the camera that is small and out of focus. Maybe a spider hanging on to a balloon web floating by in front of the camera.
The photograph shows a flash of illumination, not an explosion. The lamp was inspected, the bulb did not work but there was no physical damage.
A meteor that hit and caused a flash would have left some external marks. Not a meteor thus.
Perhaps a photoshop? A simple answer, but somehow less than pleasing.
No, what we see is the trace of a death ray, shot by a military satellite, able to take out lamp bulbs without any collateral damage. Dear god... these things could be circling above our heads as we speak... focussing their deadly beams on us...
Luckily there is an obvious and well-tested solution, which consists of a triple layer of aluminum foil wrapped securely around the head.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
It's a flying rod. Maybe the camera just caught the streak.
Maybe we're all looking at this in reverse. Perhaps something at the top of the light pole ejected an object via a small explosion, resulting in a faintly detectable smoke trail leading away from the pole.
"How do you expect me to see the forest with all these damn trees in the way?!"
Official response.
Notice the dark smear does not go all the way to the lamp post. My theory is it is a smog trail from a plane taking off or landing from an airport just across the bay. The smoke near the light pole is from a boat at the pier warming up its engine, and the sun is reflecting off the lamp post.
It was really my 1/5 scale remote controlled F-22 testing its air to surface missiles.
Tinfoil hat? Naa, I long since replaced it with a reinforced titanium alloy.
It's clearly an artifact. If the flash at the end of the streak was something "out there", it would have to have either hit the water or the light. The after pic shows no waves and the pole is unharmed--there's no even any "smoke" left. It's hard to judge how much time has passed, but it can't have been more than a few seconds. (On the far right is a speeding motorboat and he only gets a little ways between each frame.) With no fragments or smoke just a moment later, it has to be an artifact of some kind.
Looks like the sun is being lensed through the clouds in some way to create that optical effect. Not exactly sure how, though.
Your 'solution' is for a different, unrelated photo.
Am I off base here?
what you say?
obviously, this is sign of we getting signal
appeared in my underpants.
Depends - In Corea, they're only for the elderly.
I have observed this phenomena before when a jet, leaving behind it's contrail, flew between the lower cloud level and the clear sky above. If you look at the picture, the sun is illuminateing the clouds from the right, with a the streak appearing on the left. The plane therefore bisected the path causing the shadow to occur. Now the question is, what was the interval that the pictures were taken in the before and after shots. I have seen this to last a few minutes until the contrail dissipated significantly to no longer produce the shadow.
You're funny.
"Those innocent fun games of the hallucination generation"
"...is higher than that of water (1.337)." Leet indeed :)
K: On a more personal note Beatrice, Edgar ran off with an old girlfriend, you're gonna go stay with your mom a couple nights then realize you're better off.
J: Yeah, 'cause you know what? He never appreciated you anyway. In fact, *you* kicked *him* out and now that he's gone you're gonna go into town, go to Bloomingdales, find some nice dresses, you know, maybe find somewhere you can get, you know, a facial, and hire a decorator to come in here fast because... damn.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
From the headling I expected this story to be about an exhibitionist at a cricket game.
smile, it makes everyone else wonder what you're up to
Come on, it's just a hair that flew in the wind near the camera so i's a bit out of focus...
OK, here's my solution. The light levels are fairly low: the EXIF data from the big image reveals that the Powershot G3 used 1/20s exposure at f/5.6.
I reckon the streak and the blur are very, very close to the camera, and that the intersection with the streetlamp is conincidence.
I believe that the mystery object is an insect flying "north-west" (i.e. towards the top left of the camera). The EXIF data tells us that the flash was fired, although goodness knows why any decent photographer would use a flash for that shot.
The flash on most cameras fires at the beginning of the exposure time, and the insect is captured in flight and out of focus near the middle of the frame. It then continues flying for the rest of the 1/20s exposure causing the black streak.
Where do I go to collect my prize?
Ydco co
All right, Beatrice, there was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus
Religion is for people afraid of going to hell.
I saw something quite similar to this once, when I was on the beach in Charleston, SC. It looked almost as if a plane had crashed into the ocean, but I believe it was just the shadow of a jet trail from the sun:
http://misc.dhtns.com/trail_shadow.jpg
However, it doesn't quite look like the sun was in a position to cast that shadow in the picture in question.
-Elliott
Well, it's obviously Martians.
First they blow up your lightbulbs,
Then they attack you,
Then they catch your cold,
Then you win.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Something has gone horribly wrong with the joint NSA/Aussie venture working with aliens from outer space in their secret Pine Gap research base. The interplanetary war has begun, started by agents of the United States Government. I, for one, am going to lay in a supply of iodine tablets and pure drinking water in anticipation of the fallout that is sure to come after we attempt to nuke their orbiting stealth battle platforms.
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
Somebody find Reed Richards ASAP!
You've heard of a streak of light, well this is just a streak of dark.
Universal Theory of Dark
For years it has been believed that electric bulbs emitted light. However, recent information has proven otherwise. Electric bulbs don't emit light, they suck dark.
Thus we call these bulbs dark suckers. The dark sucker theory proves the existence of dark, that dark has mass heavier than that of light, and that dark is faster than light.
The basis of the dark sucker theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. Take for example, the dark suckers in the room where you are. There is less dark right next to them than there is elsewhere.
The larger the dark sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark suckers in a parking lot have a much greater capacity than the ones in this room.
As with all things, dark suckers don't last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the black spot on a full dark sucker.
A candle is a primitive dark sucker. A new candle has a white wick. You will notice that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark which has been sucked into it.
If you hold a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, the tip will turn black because it got in the way of the dark flowing into the candle. Unfortunately, these primitive dark suckers have a very limited range.
There are also portable dark suckers. The bulbs in these can't handle all of the dark by themselves, and must be aided by a dark storage unit. When the dark storage unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before the portable dark sucker can operate again.
Dark has mass. When dark goes into a dark sucker, friction from this mass generates heat. Thus it is not wise to touch an operating dark sucker.
Candles present a special problem, as the dark must travel into the solid wick instead of through glass. This generates a great amount of heat. Thus it can be very dangerous to touch an operating candle.
Dark is also heavier than light. If you swim just below the surface of a lake, you will see a lot of light. If you swim deeper and deeper, you notice it gets slowly darker and darker.
When you reach a depth of approximatley fifty feet, you are in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the lighter light floats to the top.
The immense power of dark can be utilized to man's advantage. We can collect the dark that has settled to the bottom of lakes and push it through turbines, which generates electricity and helps push dark to the ocean, where it may be safely stored.
Prior to turbines, it was it was much more difficult to get dark from the rivers and lakes to the ocean. The indians recognized this problem, and tried to solve it.
When on a river in a canoe travelling in the same direction as the flow of dark, they paddled slowly, so as not to stop the flow of dark; but when they travelled against the flow of dark, they paddled quickly so as to help push the dark along its way.
Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand in an illuminated room in front of a closed, dark closet, then slowly open the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet; but since the dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the closet.
In conclusion, I would like to say that dark suckers make all our lives much easier. So the next time you look at an electric bulb remember that it is indeed a dark sucker.
NASA is using a Canon PowerShot G3 to monitor clouds? Smells like a hoax to me.
"Meteor experts don't think it's a meteor. Atmospheric scientists don't think it's lightning".
What do they know? Those stupid hacks still can't predict the weather tomorrow.
It appears to be lightning hitting the dock light. Or a blown transformer w/ a projectile.
My first interpretation was that the bulb on the light-pole simply blew up, and the resulting flash either messed the CCD to produce the streak (I've seen many similar artefacts on digital photos), or perhaps the streak is a kind of lens flare.
that the dark streak and the bright artifact do not meet. The streak looks to be "above" the bright artifact, and continues past it.
Also, the bright artifact has a brighter core that is vertical with respect to the rest of the frame. This could be consistent with a reflection off a cylinder such as a lightpole.
It's probably just the reflection off my tinfoil hat.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
They said the bulb was burned out when they examined the light pole. Light bulbs usually go out with a bright flash. Is it possible that the image was taken when the bulb flashed and the line is an artifact of the CCD? This last 4th of July I got some strange purple lines in images I took of fireworks going off. They weren't part of the fireworks flash, but artifacts from the camera having light metered to a specific level and then suddenly encountering a bright flash (this would be different than when the camera is expecting a flash from the internal flash).
It looks like it could be some sort of reaction by a particle passing parallel across the surface of the film when the picture was snapped. It would have to be a very slow moving particle though in order to produce that sort of effect though. Thats the only think I can think of however unlikely that is. If it isn't totally obvious, I'm totally talking out of my ass by the way.
tFA doesn't say how long the exposure was. If it was long, the possibility of a popping bulb at the same moment that a bug flew past the camera begins to seem more plausible.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
I call it a skid mark. Whatever.
Actually, here is something revealing, it seems that his before and after images are reversed:
$ strings strangebefore_pryde_big.jpg | head
uExif
Canon
Canon PowerShot G3
ACD Systems Digital Imaging
2004:11:25 15:23:11
0220
0100
2004:11:22 18:53:07
2004:11:22 18:53:07
IMG:PowerShot G3 JPEG
$ strings strange_pryde_big.jpg | head
uExif
Canon
Canon PowerShot G3
ACD Systems Digital Imaging
2004:11:25 15:20:49
0220
0100
2004:11:22 18:52:52
2004:11:22 18:52:52
IMG:PowerShot G3 JPEG
$ strings strangeafter_pryde_big.jpg | head
uExif
Canon
Canon PowerShot G3
ACD Systems Digital Imaging
2004:11:25 15:22:47
0220
0100
2004:11:22 18:52:37
2004:11:22 18:52:37
IMG:PowerShot G3 JPEG
$
That solution you posted is for an entirely different photo and it seems, entirely different phenomena.
While his explanation seems plausible that does not account for:
1) the slight gray streak of what appears to be smoke in the picutre
2) why the light no longer works
The answer to the second issue could simply be one of those quirks where the bulb had reached its end of life at approximately the same time the picture was taken.
While the author is certainly more knowledgable in the area he talks about than I am, I can't say I can agree with his conclusion. The flash as shown in the photo appears to be more consistent with the effect a lightning strike has (i.e. a bright flash).
Further, if you look closely at the picture, you can distinctly see what appears to be a puff of whitish-grey smoke surrounding the light pole in question. This would also be consistent with a lightning strike. I know this because I observed the after-effect of a transformer outside my parents home getting hit by a lightning strike years ago. Even though I looked out the window seconds after the strike there was still a bit of smoke hanging about.
The fact that there is no noticable damage to the pole can be explained by using the electrocuted pickle example (get out your CSI DVD in case you're wondering what I'm talking about).
Finally, there is no rainbow effect noticeable in the photo compared to his example.
Just some food for thought (or beer if you like).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you compare the "before" picture against the "after" one, you'll notice that the tip of the light post where the flash is in the picture looks like smoking. I assume that it was, indeed, a micrometeorite which hit the light post.
In Korea only old people get streaks - Uh..wait, crap, - scratch that..I just disproved my hypothesis. Time to do some laundry!
Se here for some reports.
The streak and flash is the discussion server crashing and burning under the weight of the mighty /.
Umm... that's not the POTD that we are talking about, but rather another that he has posted. The pictures are not even close. Did you make it past the first sentence?
Troll or karma-whore? You decide.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
It's just Kirk and the gang returning with the whale so that the alien probe will stop destroying Earth. You can't see the rest of the ship because it's cloaked.
Duh?
The Chinese have an army of spies in the USA, and one of their top targets is technology related to unmanned aerial drones. The photo snapped in Australia is likely an image of a experimental Chinese drone gone awry. The Chinese launched the drone off the coast of Australia and attemped to use it to spy on Australian civilian targets.
I wonder if it's some sort of lightning strike. Not one with a spark (not in the photo anyhow), but simply the column of ionized air terminating (and destroying) the street light. There are a lot of clouds in the sky so maybe there's a sizable charge built up and it's discharging to the streetlight, which is a tall, metal, grounded object.
I've never experienced lighting directly, but I recall something about the air ionizing before the strike, which is what creates the path for the electricity to follow.
This photo is part of an automated sequence, so perhaps the electrical strike happened just a moment before the image was taken, or perhaps the ionized air was enough to destroy the light without an actual 'spark'. Without witnesses it's hard to say whether it was lighting and, as many have questioned, what's the condition of the streetlight now?
The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus. There you go. Case closed. :)
Simple, the streetlight gave up the ghost by blinking out with a bright flash. This bright flash in turn overloaded the CCD resulting in a streak in the photo.
You can simulate this yourself by pointing your digital camera at a bright light. You should see all sorts of streaks running through the image.
methinks you have mistaken http://www.slashdot.org/ with http://www.coasttocoastam.com/
Umm. That is the solution for a _different_ picture.
Seán C. McCord
i wondered where my Happy Fun Ball went!
Your response makes you look *really* stupid, because the "solution" you just read has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE MYSTERY PICTURE IN QUESTION. Worse, every single other response to the parent - most of which were BEFORE you - recognizes that (though I'll give you the benefit of the doubt there, since it took you some time to write your response). The "solution" is talking about a completely different and unrelated picture!
*Wow*.
Thanks for a good laugh though.
I, for one, welcome our streaky and glowing new overlords.
Elmo knows where you live!
rofl. How you managed to give a detailed explanation on how the "solution seems plausible" when it was a solution to an entirely different picture/problem is beyond me.
/.'ers.
Typical
No, that's for the wrong picture. RTF document before you link it!!
Martin
If it was reflecting right back at the camera, it could certainly result in that line.
It wouldn't reflect directly back, but at a slight angle. The light hitting the lense at an angle would make one side long. In this case....very long.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
I remember seeing the same thing in The Omen.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Clearly some new Romulan weapon, obviously fired from that cloaked bird of prey. This area probably had a very high neutrino density.
It's a solution to a *completely different and unrelated APOD*!
Blue chunk of iced poop falling from a plane.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
This is obviously the friction trail created by the hypersonic-speed flight path of the super-hero MICROMAN!
;-D
Sheesh that was easy! What a bunch of morons!
Frozen airline poo. You can all stop thinking about it now.
Welcome our new Tractor-beam producing overlords.
just a sun beam through a tiny hole in the clouds
1. Is the trajectory staight, or does it drop slightly. Putting a ruler up against my screen indicates it drops slightly, but that doesnt mean anything.
2. Is it a flash, or is it a steady bright light (like what a meteor head would be). Need to know the exposure time for that info.
3. Is there any sign of the trail in the after photo.
4. How long is it before the after photo was taken?
5. It the flash infront of, behind, or exactly congruent with the pole top.
6. Is the trail wider at the top than the bottom. If it is, is this dispersion of smoke or paralax and the object was moving away.
7. Is the image film or digital.
8. What is the white stuff? Shock front? Something disintegrating? Why is it that funny shape?
9. Was the light working previously? When was it last known to be working? There may be pictures of it from the night before.
Well, thats my questions. I think its a meteor.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Now obviously I could be wrong, but under the right conditions I have seen jets make shadows just like that...and the first time I saw one it kind of creeped me out too.
I thought this was kind of odd. The black streak ending in what looks like an explosion?
. jpg
Dunno..
http://users.rowan.edu/~schwab17/pictures/strange
Nah. The real aolution is here.
exif info from before, strange, after:
strangebefore_pryde_big.jpg
Model - Canon PowerShot G3
XResolution - 180
YResolution - 180
ResolutionUnit - Inch
Software - ACD Systems Digital Imaging
DateTime - 2004:11:25 15:23:11
YCbCrPositioning - Centered
ExifOffset - 223
ExposureTime - 1/20 seconds
FNumber - 5.60
ExifVersion - 0220
DateTimeOriginal - 2004:11:22 18:53:07
DateTimeDigitized - 2004:11:22 18:53:07
CompressedBitsPerPixel - 3 (bits/pixel)
ShutterSpeedValue - 1/20 seconds
ApertureValue - F 5.60
ExposureBiasValue - 0.00
MaxApertureValue - F 2.20
MeteringMode - Multi-segment
Flash - Flash fired, auto mode, red-eye reduction mode
FocalLength - 9.09 mm
SubsecTime - 3682872
FlashPixVersion - 0100
ColorSpace - sRGB
InteroperabilityOffset - 1587
ExposureMode - Auto
WhiteBalance - Auto
DigitalZoomRatio - 1.00 x
SceneCaptureType - Landscape
Maker Note (Vendor): -
Macro mode - Off
Self timer - Off
Quality - Normal
Flash mode - Not fired
Focus mode - One-Shot
Easy shooting mode - Full Auto
Contrast - Normal
Saturation - Normal
Sharpness - Normal
Metering mode - Center weighted averaging
Focus type - Manual
Focal length - 0 - 0 mm (18688 mm)
Flash details - Internal
Focus mode 2 - 18208
White Balance - Auto
Sequence number - 0
Flash bias - 544.00 EV
Subject Distance - 384 mm
File: - strange_pryde_big.jpg
DateTime - 2004:11:25 15:20:49
DateTimeOriginal - 2004:11:22 18:52:52
DateTimeDigitized - 2004:11:22 18:52:52
File: - strangeafter_pryde_big.jpg
DateTime - 2004:11:25 15:22:47
DateTimeOriginal - 2004:11:22 18:52:37
DateTimeDigitized - 2004:11:22 18:52:37
Congratulations.
It appears the "flash" is light reflecting off of the lightpost. The streak could easily be explained by the light hitting the camera at an angle.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
Another sighting of the Australian puma!
It certainly looks very much like ball lightning to me. Googling "ball lightning" seems to confirm this, in my opinion.
Unfortunately, ball lightning is often dismissed.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Right solution, wrong picture!!
While you're at it, mod this dickwad down for being the 17th person to point that out.
That Aolution is the aolution to a completely different article ;)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I didn't notice this until I looked at the before and after pictures in sequence with the main picture. But it appears that the streak may be the trail of some object hitting the water. If you look where the streak meets the water, there seems to be something bright where the streak meets the water that is not in either of the other 2 images.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
looks like slashdot has raped ANOTHER NASA server!
Slashdot - 2
NASA - 0
"And so the Trekkies were executed in the mannor most befitting virgins - thrown into volcanoes" - Futurama
The black streak is exhaust.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
in the sky
I would rue the day I walk outside, looked up, and saw goatse.....
Monstar L
Did anyone else think it may just be a weird coincidence. The bulb was not borken but it wasn't functional either. Lightbulbs often emit a flash of light right before they burn out. The conrail streak may not be related to this, quite possibly from some fireworks. The streak just happend to line up with the lamp. Then the camera caught the lamp just as it flashed before it burned out.
You're the 16th person to point that out. RTF replies before you add a new one!!!!
A plane's contrail and sunset.
I suspect the contrail dispersed after the shot was taken, before the next NASA shot was snapped.
As for the sunset- Surely people have seen mountain peaks and clouds which are still in full sunlight, while the surface is in shadow?
As much as I'd like there to be a more interesting resolution to this, I just don't see it.
You're the 10th person to point that out. Illiterate or simply couldn't be bothered to read the other replies? You decide.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Even after so many people pointed it out, it was continuing to be modded up, and was +5 as I posted, and for a couple minutes after. Since I was posting at +2 karma bonus, there was a chance of some moderators seeing my post sooner in threaded view vs all the 0 and +1 posts.
A "laser" attached to a friggen shark.
We are the people our parents warned us about.
Take a look at the way the clouds are moving - I've never seen clouds billowing inwards.
before
"the" picture
after
Ummm. Well done. You're the 15th person to point that out.
Check your local Joe Dirt type and see if he's lugging around a "meterorite." Check for space peanuts too.
Look...I told you fools earlier...its MICROMAN using his hypersonic power of flight to dive into the water to fight the evil of Dr. Atlantcus and his submerged menions!
Jezz!
Since you have been outed as a fraud, it appears that my own solution is now just as valid. I believe it is a consortium of Martians coming to sign the closing papers on the other recent Slashdot articles. Remember we are making Parks and designing suitable housing for the Red Planet.
This is the same phenomena you see from the sun
http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/atoptics/ray1.htm
At the moment of instantaneous flash, a source of ambient light travels towards the camera, same as the sun, in parallel rays. Since the camera, observer, is at a distance, these rays seem to diverge as they approach, think of railroad tracks that appear closer together further down the track, but are nonetheless parallel.
Unlike the suns crepuscular rays though, which we see as brighter owing to the fact that most are blocked by clouds when we observe crepuscular rays, only a very tiny fraction of the rays are blocked in this photo, possibly by a section of the pole the flash occurs from. Thus, the ambient lighting is slightly increased, except along the parallel ray that is blocked.
I have not come up with a valid source of the flash, I must admit the smoke confuses me there, but my best guess it a transformer or bulb.
pr stunt for http://www.whitenoisemovie.com
You're the 13th person to point that out. Maybe read the previous replies before adding one.
And even with 13 people reporting it, it seems it's not enough judging by the moderation
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Was a filter of some sort used? It looks as though it's a plane, since there is an artifact by the street light, not something hitting the street light. It appears reflected to me. The path is darker than the object.
I for one welcome our alien overlords
I want to believe ;)
I don't see what the fuss is about, it's just where the texture repeats!
Fnord.
Yes, those pictures are out of order. Check the time stamp on the pictures.
It's rather odd that the streak is a perfectly straight line.... You would think that if "something" is in the atmosphere, it would curve, possibly degrade in trajectory (stupid friction)
Is there a casing surrounding the cammera, and is it metal? That could account for the "perspective" shift. It appears like a view camera, where a tilt can control perspective.
... with the firmware version 1.02 of the G3 camera devices. Please upgrade to solve the problem.
I think it's some space debris falling at a high angle. Metal in origin, a part of it would have survived through the atmosphere and traveled at high velocity, turned into a molten form and splashed down in the lake. As you can see, besides the flash (from the impact) there was steam from the water. The dark streak that was left behind was the burning of impurities in the metal itself. I bet if they took divers out to that location and checked the bottom of the floor they would find a fist full of metal that's fairly un-corroded from the rest of the junk there.
Did anyone think to check the streetlight for damage ?
sheesh
I bet the Bush Administration was trying to wipe out a nearby gay bar with a laser weapon and missed. Instead, it struck that light pole. Ole W's prolly got him a Death Star up there in space that he's using to shoot everyone who doesn't live in Jesusland. And I'm pretty sure Australia didn't vote for Bush. So they are gonna get it for sure.
And don't try to tell me different cause I'uns went to college. Well, NC State anyway.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I want to be the first to welcome our new black streak overlords.
Here's what I have gathered from the other posts: 1. Something from "out there" - unlikely, because there would be some residual effect in the next photograph. However, a small enough object may not make that big of a splash or smoke. Additionally, if the object struck the street lamp, it would have caused damage (which it didn't). If the object didn't strike the pole, then it created the flash coincidentally directly behind the pole. 2. Problem with camera, et. al. - unlikely, because none of the other images show a similar problem. Also, the "problem" would have to have created three coincidental effects. a) the streak, b) the flash, and c) the smoke. 3. Streak came from the street lamp - unlikely, because the street lamp shows no damage. I can see a bright flash from a burning out bulb causing a streak on the film, but that does not explain the smoke. Other than image doctoring, have I missed anything?
Was JUST a demonstration of my powers. Next time I will hit downtown Enid Oklahoma unless I receive the sum of One Million Dollars. Muhahahaha Muhahahaha Muhahahaha!
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Maybe this is just APoD's game of NotPron (deathball.net/notpron/). We're supposed to take the image and raise the contrast or look at it under the moonlight or something so we can reveal a hidden message that leads to the next mystery. 0.0001% of the population make it to Level 2.
Paleontologists don't think it is a dinosaur, NASA doesn't think it is a spacecraft, financial experts don't think it will have an adverse effect on the economy, lawyers could be preparing a lawsuit on behalf of Bigfoot for IP infringement, the FDA has said it could have adverse side effect, the White House has declined to comment. Currently the photo is on sale at eBay with the high bid at $785.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
One of the original stories on this http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11 483286%255E13762,00.html credited the photo to amateur photographer Wayne Pryde.
The bit about cloud "monitoring" appears only in the APOD story.
WTF?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
There's a link at the bottom of the page that explains the picture. http://space.mit.edu/~lewin/apod/
Come On. Read to the bottom!
Somehow I doubt that a meteorite that was going fast enough to vaporize on impact would leave a *dark* steak in the frame. Secondly, if it was big enough to leave that wide a dark streak, it would make a MUCH bigger impact than that little flash. But moments later, there's no visible sign, even in the water.
I personally own a similar Canon G-3, and I've never seen a dark streak on the image, even when shooting pictures with a strong point light source (as was speculated for a blowing-out light bulb). In fact, with the G-3, a well known problem is "purple fringing" around bright lights. None of that here, so the bright splotch is probably not that bright.
I personally subscribe to the "bug in front of the flash" theory.
(Question: one post suggested the EXIF data shows the flash fired. Why would a halfway decent photog leave the flash on for a distance shot like this? It just risks illuminating the dust between you and the subject matter.)
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
``We don't know what it is, but it's ours and everyone who has looked at the photo now needs an SCO licence for their brain.''
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
It is merely a weather balloon. Now look at this light for a sec.
why cant we host the image at slashdot itself ? why do we have to down site after site ? hmmm... copyrights maybe a problem. but cant we do something abt it ?
Looks to me like there are a series of fringes parallel to the streak (and below) suggesting an optical origin.
My hypothesis is that sunlight happens to reflect off the pole and at exactly the time of the photo
hits the camera (sun is moving). The streak is from the camera lens scattering this sunlight...
It looks like a lightning bug to me. If you lower the brightness and increase the contrast of the image, you can see a shape below the flash that looks like a body with wings. The body of the bug caused the dark streak, and he flashed us just as the shutter was closing.
There appears to be a surfaced submarine to the right of the impact area. Maybe this was one of those space-based "throw metal at the ground" weapons being tested on the sub.
They just got tired of the lights running all night and couldn't sleep.
You'll be complaining about hanging chads next. Get over it. Get over yourself.
seems to be the simplest answer to me, something like a bottle rocket could make a flash like that when it explodes and a tiny, almost indistinguishable cloud of smoke as a tail. I am surprised such a hoopla is being made over this, when there are so many possible explanations for the phenomena pictured.
Yaaay!!!
eom
of impact suggests to me that this is probably artificially launched.
I passed the Turing test.
...There was supposed to be an Earth Shattering KABOOM!
o.O
I think it's a piece of debris from an airplane. Perhaps a chunk of ice, which might explain the trail. Do any airplanes discharge their toilets while airborne?
See? How difficult was that?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
"The light pole near the flash has been inspected and does not show any damage, although the light inside was not working."
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Number two... fire the laser!
I know that I sure wouldn't be able to resist. I'd have a list of options to spring on the unsuspecting photographer, like:
- bunny-ears added to people in the scene
- green Matrix-like tint
- tiny UFO in background
I mean, how much fun would that be, if one out of every million photos taken with that model camera had a little UFO up in the corner of the sky? It would be the coolest thing to watch people go nuts trying to figure that one out.Now, look at this little red light. Its just swamp gas from a weather balloon reflecting off of Venus.
rewriting history since 2109
I see shadows like this all the time. An object small cloud or something casts a shadow that shadow can be seen as a line of darkness against a light background. Just so happens the shadow is falling on the lighs sensor making it come on. Still 1 in a million picture though.
Did someone in the boat let of a flare?
It could be a rocket impacting a dude with invisibility or maybe a weird kind of BFG-10K (the original has red trails you know)
High end machine too. (judging from the rendering details)
This story is two weeks old.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
... that was my orbiting brain laser. Sorry for the confusion.
-Derek
Anyone look at the position of the boats. Specifically the little one nearest the flash. Position doesn't seem consistent between the before/during/after.
rewriting history since 2109
Itsa 'nother slashdotted server going up in a smokey poof
Table-ized A.I.
Somebody put a little flower in front of the camera. It is so close that is out of focus.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
I see a bright light in upper right corner of the photo. The line is going from upper left to bottom right, and appears to have nothing to do with the bright light; the line itself seems to have nothing to do with any flash of light.
Now, my eyes certainly aren't the best, too many years squinting at computer monitors, but it looks to me like the black streak doesn't even touch the flash, but instead vanishes over the horizon, somewhere in that land mass. Also, if it was something hitting the pole, it would have been damaged, and if it had hit the water, later photos would have shown the splash/ripples. Well, maybe. It would depend on the length of time between photos, I guess. It doesn't extend to the end of the photo, either, but goes into some of those clouds on the left. The flash looks like it has some kind of aura around it, like when they remade the first Death Star blowing up, but again, it's hard for me to see, and it could just be the light reflecting off a ripple in the water. I think the flash it just the light blowing, however. I don't know. If the black streak were in more than just the one picture, I would just chalk it up to a distant vapor trail from a jet taking off or something. If it's something flying through the air, it'd have to be travelling pretty damn fast to be so straight, whether it's going up or down. My best guess would be at it travelling up. I should think that if it were falling, it'd have more of an arc to it. Really, we'll probably never know what it is.
"I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with subatomic particles."
If you follow the speedboat on the far right, it is heading inbound. It moves a little to the left, then ducks behind the pier except for a small bit of the tail end of it. This happens in proper sequence. Likewise the tugboat moves just a little to the right in each successive picture.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
This is more evidence to corroborate the theory that mutant bugs are taking over the earth.
s /2 0020924-mutant-fly.shtml
Here's more evidence:
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/mshnvm/volcanocam/faq
Ok, I did some work on this...
First, EXIF fields in the photos... something you should look at first.
Camera: Canon PowerShot G3
Date and Time (original): 2004:11:22 18:52:52
Exposure Time: 1/19 sec.
Aperture: f/5.6
And for the photo After:
Date and Time (original): 2004:11:22 18:52:37
So the photos were taken with 1/19 sec. exposure, every 15 seconds.
I took the two images into GIMP, substracted them, brightened the result a lot (using Levels) and ran it through despecle. First, the lamps do look perfectly identical between the photos (or there'd be a spot around the lamp where it changed shape). In fact, the only bright bits that remain (apart from the sea reflections) are the flash and the streak.
The streak looks conical, at 1-1.5 degrees (I measured roughly using GIMP). It ends before the edge of the picture. It's about 1200 pixels long, in fact. The street lamps are 60 pixels long... Assuming that a street lamp would be on the order of 5-10 metres high, you get about 100-200 metres streak.
The cloud is VERY visible on the difference image; it has yellow-orange central spot and 2 pure-white spots to the sides; this seems consistent with a central fire and a smoke circle.
Now I substracted the before and after image and brightened them the same way. I *think* there is a visible dark spot at the place where the white cloud was; however, the image is so noisy that it could just be my imagination.
I think that the flash and the cloud were from the blown lamp. They dissipated rapidly, but there could be traces left... I'd have to do much better image processing to be able to tell.
I have no idea whatsoever what the dark streak could be. It doesn't look like a CCD sensor problem - overloaded CCDs leak brightness straight up, as far as I know. I also don't know of any lens flare that can darken the photo. It could be smoke, in which case something would be hitting the street lamp. But that would've caused lots of visible damage.
I refuse to use
This is either an internal relection within the camera, or an object so close to the lens it is out of focus.
My first guess is the internal reflection of some mechanism behind the camera lens. It looks just like the reflection you see of yourself when looking out of a window.
The line is too straight to be a moving object out by the shore. It is more likely a string or stick with something on the end close to the lens. (the string would be swinging to make it straight.)
I'm going with internal reflection.
a line of dust on the film/ccd... dots and patches occur on most digital slrs if lenses are removed in non sterile surroundings often enough...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Well, after looking at the 3 photos (before, during, and after) it can't be hitting/from the street lamp. Here is why: 1. Before and After both show street lamp intact. 2. Flash obscures street lamp, so it occurs in front of the lamp or from the lamp. 3. It appears that the smoke is behind the lamp (at least partially) since the lamp is not obscured as much as the water. What I originally thought it might have been was a transformer exploding from the lamp and the camera doing something strange to cause the dark line. But since the lamp looks no different in the before and after photos, this likely isn't the case. Based on the lack of a smoke cloud in the after picture and the odd fact the smoke appears to be falling in the event picture...
This image, whatever it is, is not an image of an impact. If something had impacted the light pole there would be trails of debris streaking away from the impact in the opposite direction. If you look at the large image, there appears to be smoke or steam surrounding the light pole. Being a photographer my first instinct is that something happened to the light, or something in the light, that caused a bright flash. The line is merely an optical artifact of the event. There are probably other lines, but the visible one is the only one that runs entirely along a neutral gray background where a slight change in contrast would be very visible.
Do you think it couuld be a stray military missile? Such things sometimes happen (remember suspicions about a TWA airplane being hit by a rocket?), and compare streaks with those on pictures below: http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/aminet/pix/vehic/missil e.jpg
http://www.sterett.org/images/miscphotos/Dave%20Bi lak/DB-Missile%20trail.jpg
http://www.cpf.navy.mil/rimpac2000/images/missile3 .jpg
Finally we have proof.
Looks like a human hair on the lense to me...
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Since it is linear, could it be that the camera memory was mid-scan and the elements in the matrix were not fully refreshed due to a current surge or sag?
...well fellow Slashdotters, from what I can theorize from squinting at the photo, it looks like someone has already built a prototype space elevator. First mentioned on Slashdot - here.
I saw something like this the other day! I was driving to get some food and when I reached a red light, I looked up into the sky and there was a black streak across the sky. It looked like an airplane con trail, except no puffiness, smooth, and black! I then crossed the intersection and pulled into Chickfila, and then looked backup into the sky, and could not find this streak at all, anywhere! That was the wierdest thing I have ever seen!
Am I the only one seeing smoke from the bottom of the lamp-post?
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here.
Look, there are boats in the picture, there could be another one past the light pole, obscured by the trees. Maybe tied up to the low level docks you can see to the right of the light pole.
Someone on the dock or in a boat behind the tree shot a flare gun out towards the water. The streak across the picture is an artifact because the flare was so bright.
Now the real question is whether there was another flare shot from the grassy knoll?
The Department of Homeland Security has determined that this is definitely some sort of weapon of mass destruction.
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Maybe the light bulb in the lamp failed and created a bright flash.
Maybe the streak is a shadow of the light fixture.
So that the shadow is going UP from this bright light source...?
Anyone else notice that the smoke trail doesn't taper off as it gets higher into the sky? It's just as wide as it fades into the clouds as it is near the ground.Someone forgot to Photoshop in perspective. All this image needs is Bigfoot in the foreground and a UFO or two off in the distance... oh, and http://www.fark.com printed in the bottom of it.
Ok, it's really simple.
1) It's bright.
Bright things moving though the atmosphere tend to be very very hot.
2) It's durable.
Things that make it this far down tend to be be fairly substantial in nature.
So now we supposively have a bright, hot, durable object impacting a body of water at high speeds... THAT LEAVES NO TRACE AFTER IMPACT. Steam maybe? A ripple or two? Honestly, would somebody like to run a simulation on a superheated baseball sized rock slamming into the ocean at close to mach? Maybe a golfball to be conservative? Heck, I'm speculating the damn thing might explode just in temperature differential alone when it touches the water, if not angerly boil for a good long time.
The only conclusion I can specuate where it may have been any substantial object falling from the sky is that one in a billion chance it actually fully vaporized a second before impact. Even so, you'd still have some sort of audio event at those speeds, I'm imagining.
I'm going for visual artifact or an environmental lighting glitch myself.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no mod points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Part of the problem is that with a single viewpoint, we cannot know how far from the camera the bright spot was really located. I think its intersection with the light pole is a visual coincidence, and that it is IN FRONT of the pole. Part of my reason for thinking this has to do with the so-called "smoke", which looks to me more like a side view of a supersonic shock wave. Part of that "smoke" is clearly in front of the base of the light pole. So, the distance between the camera and the pole should be inspected, for impact evidence.
You can see this dark streak almost every day in southern california, or almost anyplace that has contrails visible in the sky. When the contrail goes between you and the sun, you can see a dark band coming down from it. Watch for it!
Basically, what you are seeing is the equivalent of a sunbeam, except that it's a shadow-beam. A sunbeam occurs when there is a small hole in the cloud, and the light going through the hole illuminates the dust particles and water droples in the air along the path of the light. If the light is strong and the background relatively dark, it is easy to see these sunbeams (or God rays.)
Shadows through the sky are somewhat harder to see, because the contrast is not as great. When they are dramatic, as in this picture, you have to have the fortuitous situation of looking through a long, well defined slab of shadowed air, with well-lit air on either side. Airplane contrails are the perfect shadow source for this.
Imagine a 3D volume of a shadow cast by a contrail. It is a long thin slab of shadowed air. If you are within that slab, and looking along it, all the air in that direction is shadowed, for many miles, so the contrast between the shadowed air and the surrounding air is strong.
A good bit of the light around the shadow beam is not light scattered by dust or water droplets, but is just the same Raliegh-scattered light that makes the sky blue. The dark streak through the sky will be noticably darker and especially less blue than the surrounding air.
As you can tell, this is one of my favorite (of many!) atmospheric optical phenomena. Once you start to look for them, they are quite easy to see. Occasionally you can see them from natual cloud formations or even topographical or architechural features when the conditions are just right.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I've heard of the same thing. Rods if you search on UFO stuff. There just bugs.
http://www.ufotheatre.com/rods/rods.htm
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
http://taree.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?story_id= 355753&class=news
Headline: Meteorite boom shakes Manning
That was easy next... Actually I think it is just a survey marker the heavy equipment will be here next tuesday.
Maybe this will shed some light. It's a Photoshop "difference" between the before image and the mystery image, with a bit of levels adjustment to make it more obvious. http://img119.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img119&image=x2fst rangeprydebigdi.jpg
Yes, we ALL noticed it. That's what this entire thread is about!
It's an eyelash or a hair or piece of fur flying through the air. For a second it lands on or is directly in front of the lense. Then the wind blows it on it's way again. The white part is the folicle (or whatever it's called) of the hair. It looks all blurry because it's right in front of the lense and isn't focused on.
There is a barge that is going by on the right side of the picture near the bridge and the crane that is down. Way off in the distance behid this there is a light off on the horizon (on the far right of the picture.
If you down load all three pictures into one directory and then use gthumbs (or any other slide show program) you can see the three pictures repeating in sequence.
You will notice that the there is a small annular ring with thick lines coming from it right and down from the flash (almost on top of it).
This same annular ring shows up in a small size on the next frame.
My quess is that as this was late and the light levels were low, that there was a distant light house (that flash on the horizon?). The effects of the light from the light house are what may have cause some of what we see.
I don't think that Ihave a full solution, but it seems to me that at least some of what we see is due to lens effects. Why else would the little saturn shaped annular region with 45d degree lines jump up and to the right on the next picture.
You can really see this if you animate the pictures as well as the light on the horizon.
One other note: There is no reflection on the water of the streak, but strangly it seems that there is another streak that parallels the first.
It should reflect the first if it was way off in the air and not just a CCD effect. That is what it seems like to me, a CCD effect at the same time that a light on a pole exploded. And that just happened coorespond with the effect on the lens of the distant light house.
So we have two things: A light exploding on a pole with a CCD effect at a 45 degree angle and
a distant light house with a cycle that occasionally corresponds with the shutter of this camera.
Does this sound reasonable?
It's something like a hair or spider web, so close to the lens that it's unfocused. Small things that close and out of focus usually show up transparent like that.
Maybe this will shed some light. It's a Photoshop "difference" between the before image and the mystery image, with a bit of levels adjustment to make it more obvious. http://img119.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img119&image=x2fst rangeprydebigdi.jpg
But if the before and after pictures are swapped, then it still moves correctly, but in the opposite direction. And zooming in, I think I can see the wake to the left of the boat, which agrees with reversed photos. It's behind the dock, then about middle from dock to edge, then near the edge, moving right. It's telling that some of the street lights on the dock are on, and the picture is taken near dusk. Thus, the timing is such that the bulb tries to turn on, but blows.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
It's an eSheep burning up on re-entry.
Don't even pretend like you don't know what eSheep is just because you're all into Linux and shit.
Carpe Deez
C'mon guys, haven't you ever seen a meridian from below before ?
Good one.
I did some image processing on this image and discovered a couple things:
1) The "streak" does not line up with the street light. If I draw a straight line right along the very bottom side of the streak, it's barely touching the street light. But who really knows...
2) As someone else mentioned, the "before" and "after" images are reversed.
3) The leaves in the trees/bushes near the camera do not move more than a pixel or two. The clouds move a little (looks pretty cool in sequence, actually), but not a lot. This leads me to believe that there is very little wind. However, by watching the waves in the water over the 3 frames, it appears that the wind is traveling towards the camera and to the camera's right. This is consistant with the direction the "smoke" appears from the streetlight with the "flash". Due to the somewhat calm nature of the wind, the smoke must have been traveling for some non-zero period of time, and obviously a much longer time than the period of the exposure of the camera (or we'd see smoke blurred all the way out from the light).
4) Now I will contradict the last thing I said. Notice that the "smoke" from the light is perfectly semetrical and has an odd shape, sort of like a curly-brace '}'. Its direction relative to the light is exactly opposite that of the streak. This may lead one to conclude these two shapes are related. Fudging #1 a bit, this would lead me to believe that the streak and the "smoke" are artifacts generated by the lens of the camera. Notice that the streak only appears on parts of the image with certain brightness levels. One might note also that the hue of the streak is exactly the same as the hue of the clouds around it, it is just darker.
So I don't know exactly what's going on, but my guess would be a camera artifact taking place as a result of an exploding street light at the moment the image was captured.
The article mentions the lightpost will be/was inspected for damage. I would like to see the results of such an inspection (and an inspection of the surrounding area) if it was in fact performed.
Maybe someone should find out from the person swimming off of that boat.
Looks to me like the light probably blew out and the flash from it caused the camera to have the streak..
Anyone else notice the guy by his car in the "after" picture which is apparently actually the "before" picture? He's below the first white building to the left of the flash, near the bottom of the tree line.
He is absent from the streak picture.
He is back again in the "before" picture which is actually the "after" picture, standing near the cliff edge at the left end of the beach parking lot.
Clearly the streak is an artifact of the EM pulse created during his teleportation.
Shades of Grayden
It's a miniature black hole. Think someone in China caught it on film too? The flash is where it entered the water, just happened to be in-line with the light pole.
Ma gavte la nata
Why spread useless information? If you read the article that you linked to you would have read this: "Residents, including Mr Hannaford, who scanned the sky after hearing the bang found it cloudless, starry, and with a waning half-moon directly above." The picture is not from 4:30 AM, nor is it "cloudless or, starry, and with a waning half-moon directly above"
Its the Matrix coming undone at the seams, and hoping for a better plotline to finish the trilogy with.
Nobody's seen Keanu in a while.
Here's my take on it.
The guy may be somwehat okay with Photoshop, but he oughta learn a bit more physics.
The street lamp failed with a bright flash, sparks, and smoke. Happens all the time. The camera captures both direct light from the flash and indirect light from the flash reflected from particles in the air. The indirect light is mostly uniform except where the street lamp pole is shadowing the flash. Hence a streak. Happens all the time at sunsets if you look carefully.
...did you see Elvis?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Not likely since it was no where near that streetlight, that "flash" is the splash with heat release when it hit the water.
It's a firefly. The "smoke" is the wings (illuminated by the firefly's own light), the bright flash is the light, the dark path the firefly's path before lighting up. Anyone know if there are fireflies in that area?
A piece of crud hanging by a thread or hair from the opening blade of a focal plane shutter in a 35MM film camera will generate a diagonal black streak. Was this picture taken with an SLR?
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
I read the headline and eagerly hoped for a picture of another lady running across a test match cricket pitch .... alas, it wasn't.
Your the 4th person to point out to somebody was the Nth person to point that out. RTF replies before you add a new one yourself!!!
Note: I'm only the 1st person to point this out, so this doesn't count.
Like a model rocket or say, a bullet? It could also be radiation of some kind instead of a solid object, a kind of radiation which turns atmosphere dark and lightpoles sparky.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
The broken light is throwing everyone off. Forget the light, just coincidence. The "line" doesn't extend to the light, imo. I think it actually has to do with the land behind the light across the water. Thats where the "end" is.
Look at it from that point of view.
Evidence:
Black line from sky to ground, or nearly so. I've seen these before in desert dusty settings as contrails of jets flying over, exactly like that, but this is too narrow.
White "splash" at end of black streak. Could be object hitting water, like a meteor. Very possible.
"Smoke" near flash point. This seems odd if the origin is above and not below, because the flash and smoke would have to appear at the same time, rather than flash, then smoke (or spray, if water impact). Maybe if the shockwave of the spray/explosion was sufficient, it could compress, then decompress the air in front of it to form a tiny cloud. Aircraft wings do this on occasion.
Theories:
If the dark line were not so straight, I'd suspect a two stage model rocket launched closer to the "beach", with the first burning out just a few feet off the ground, and the second stage one of those ultra-light puppies that basically disappears when lit.
I like the insect theory. I was taking pictures with a G2 (predecessor to the camera used here) and got a "UFO" along with my shots of the Chicago Air and Water Show. It took ten minutes to determine that the perfectly focused dark odd shape was actually a butterfly about ten feet in front of me when I was photographing parachutists in the background. It couldn't be any farther away because the atmospheric distortion would have softened the edges. So a bug by the lens, aligned with a fish jumping - that could about do it.
The cosmic ray theory is good except for one thing - they show up a lot in space probe images and are always white lines, not dark. The electrical signal caused by the ray turns the CCD imager on, not off.
However, a cyclical error in the imager or processor that does not overlap the scan rate could, itself, have been caused by a transient electrical event (often a cosmic ray) in the processor. Doing so could make a diagonal line in the image. It might even make the flash. It wouldn't make the smoke effect, though.
My only theories that seem to account for everything are meteor coming down or rocket going up, or of course hoax.
A meteor seems best just given that anything in space, the smaller it is, the more frequently it shows up. Earth picks up tons of space dust every day from micro meteors. This would simply take a metallic or carbon-rich meteor smaller than a baseball, which statistically speaking probably hit somewhere on the planet dozens of times a day.
You've got to ask yourself, are the streak, flash and smoke actually connected events or are they coincidental?
And here's the kicker: Were the two photographs really taken in that order and not the reverse? That would explain why there's absolutely no remnants of smoke in the "after" picture.
I think it's a hair across the lens.
But then, I'm not a RealPhotographer...
sigs, as if you care.
"A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans... or at least put out a street light."
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I for one welcome our miniscule streaky overlords.
Seriously though, this is pretty dumb, it appears to be nothing but a camera problem, either that or it miraculouly doesn't effect ANYTHING around it. I had a camera once that did nothing but leave little smear shapes around things, wasn't aliens or meteors, it was a shit camera.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Was it damaged? Kinda important here.
The lamp on the light pole burned out with a pop, the resulting "trail" is nothing more than a pseudo lens flare or visual artifact caused by the flash on the camera.
They just updated the message in the APOD to suggest people participate here: [Note: This bulletin board is currently experiencing load problems. Please check back later, or participate in the discussion on Slashdot.org here.] Thank you, Slashdot, for enabling the eclectic brain trust of APOD readers!
The current APOD
It all goes downhill from first post
I analysed the images and found that there is reflected light on the water that places the flash very close to the street light. Try this: - Load all three images into Photoshop. - Convert each image to Multichannel mode. - Select the yellow channel only in each image (channels window) - Bring up your curves window "Cmd+M":mac, "Ctrl+M":PC - Set the highlights: input 40% output 0% and the shadows: input 62% output 100% Do this for each image on the yellow channel only (save the curve and reuse it for each image for accuracy) Once each yellow channel is adjusted. (make sure you are not viewing channels in the the channel colour - view yellow as black) Tab through (cycle) each image to see the highlight in the water appear. (zoom out from each image with your keyboard - PS will place them all at the same position on your screen for a still animation). The light reflection you see will be a similar effect produced by lights on the waters edge from a NYC skyline at night - Tall and defused. It's not a bug. There is no smoke. That is a flash near the street light. No camera flash was used, and there is no sun beams present in the scene. I have no other explanation at this time. All I can say is the dark line is not smoke.
Looks like a picture of a bottle rocket just as it explodes. The bottle rocket would have exploded between the camera and the light posts in the background. Because there are no good points of reference for the contrail, it looks farther away than it is.
Although the bottle rocket would have to originate outside of the picture at the upper left, which is unlikely unless there's a tall building or hill over there. That and it's unlikely that the contrail would be completely gone by the time the after picture was taken.
I like this theory. Interesting!
The flash/"smoke ring" isn't addressed, but it could be a coincidence? The thing is, it couldn't really be light reflecting off of that pole from the sun, as it would be currently in the path of the "shadow-beam". So what is it?
You can pick your nodes, and you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your friend's nodes
The photo appears if it was taken in the Sydney area. The Manning area is 200 km north, and it is quite possible that if someone was 200km away, they do not have the same cloud coverage as Sydney. Why do you say the photo was not taken in early morning?
This is the work of John Titor!
If you had a bright flash from the light as it burned out, an obstacle in the upper left corner of the light globe, AND the proper humidity conditions, you might get a visible shadow pointing away from the light. Kindof the reverse of what you sometimes get when the sun breaks through a cloud deck.
I don't need any questions answered, it's clear that this could only be one thing: a quark matter strike!
Albeit a very small one.
However, it vindicates this guy.
the sun is top right, shadows and sunbeams should go top right to bottom left I think.
The possibility that it is a plane contrail is pretty null, because the light source of the picture comes from the far right corner, either even with or maybe behind the larger white cloud. This would make casting a shadow across a cloud parallel to the light source fairly far-fetched, unless you're taking into consideration reflection, but that would have to be an incredibly strong reflection to create such a contrasting streak. The streak almost seems transparent, and if you look close enough appears to end on the horizon, not passing over the small amount of water between the horizon line and the lamp post. This could be a trick of color though, because the trail has a sort of blueish hue in comparison with the ionized clouds behind it. Light flash on the post does look like a reflection, at least the brighter yellow hue. There are smaller whisps of what almost looks like smoke surrounding it. What I can think of, other than the absurd, is a sort of electrical charge in this falling object, that came so close to the light that it fried the blub. This would account for the undamaged pole and the non-working light, and possibly the flash. The trail seemes too long and large for a falling object though, and frames before and after show no trail or streak. This would let one infer that if it were a falling object it would be travelling very, very fast, and if touchdown was in the water there would have been a splash in the following frames. The other interesting thing is that the trail doesn't appear beyond the clouds in the upper left of the picture, meaning that it either originated in the clouds or could only show with a contrasting background. SO, after all this, I still don't know for sure. But my guess is a highly charged particle or group of particles, after travelling through the clouds and creating the trail at very high speed, passed by the lamp and created a short from the energy they were omitting. They then hit the water, making no or little splash, all withing a short period of time.
...of the coming of the Lord.
What about the movement of the boats? They all seem to be going in a constant direction.
But how do you explain the smoke?
And, a reflection would cause a bright streak, not a dark streak.
It appears the streetlight simply burnt out... This would cause a small explosion, but does not damage the light... The artifact cast is just from the bright light emitted. If you look very closely, there is a small amount of 'fuzz' around the light in the last picture that wasn't there in the first... Occams Razor ;-) Simplest explanation is the most likely...
Also, the boat in the background isn't moving ;-)
Anyway, flame away...
If you zoom in to where the bright light is, about 400% digital zoom with Photoshop, you can tell that the smoke is actually coming out from far below the tip of the light? It actually looks like some steam or something coming from the ground, moving up from the left side of the pole.
At least the steam/smoke part of it definitely doesn't look like anything related to this so-called "impact".
Zoom in on the pic at the end of the steak. Theres a weird shape. Any ideas? It looks like its either the source or the endpoint.
wonder if an airplane left a line in the clouds?
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Before
Flash
After
I was heading west in Arizona with a front of clouds, similar to that in the picture, in front of me. I saw for a brief amount of time a straight, diagonal line across the cloud front. I would appear and disappear. It was so cool, I pulled over to take a shot with my Digital Reb. On inspection of the sky it appeared that the line was a shadow being cast on the cloud front by a exhaust trail from a high flying jet. It looked almost exactly the same. But, unlike the picture there was no explosion to mark where the shadow terminated on the horizon.
My take is that this is merely a con-trail shadow, and the explosion is him capturing the reported failure of the wharf light in one of his time exposed shots.
NMG
If you look just to the upper right of the rightmost tree, there is what appears to be a light-purplish flash behind the bridge pillar. The light post appears to be on the other side of the bridge (or conveyor) and looks like the trajectory would end up in the water. The sonic boom, if there was one, could have caused the lamp to go out without the particle physically striking the post. Probably a near miss. While it could be a jpeg compression artifact, it IS in the trajectory of the 'tunnel'. I think that the most likely explanation is a sand-grain sized meteorite who's final demise was caused; not by striking the light post, but by the atmospheric friction which happened to be at the highest just above the surface of the water. The moisture from the water might have played a role in the atmospheric density. It is a one and a billion shot but how many billions of images have been taken since the invention of the camera!
ball lightning
It's the first unoffical test of the crossbow project. Because the best defense is a good ofense.
No but really that is quite interesting, if it's real. 14:57, 14:58....
*hangs head in shame*
should have read title when previewing...sorry
Was the photo taken outside or from inside behind glass? If the latter, its a reflection.
one thing that everyone is overlooking: if you look at all three photos, you'll notice that the "light pole" is actually the mast of a sailboat on the other side of the pier. look closely and calmly at the before and after shots. you can just see the rigging on the mast. the light poles on the pier are regularly spaced, of one consistent height, and have obvious light fixtures on top. the other vertical elements (irregularly spaced, of differing heights, with no obvious light fixtures) are boat masts, including the pole that is intimately involved with the mysterious phenomenon. some masts have running lights atop them, but those are generally very small. the "exploding bulb" theory is completely invalid, i think. also, as several posters have mentioned, the sunlight on the clouds indicate that the sun is below the horizon to the right and behind the photographer. on another list, the guy who supplied the photo said it was early in the morning when he took the pictures. there's no sun to reflect off of anything down by the water, unless it's off the clouds first. there's definitely no way that a contrail could leave a shadow at that angle, despite what many very confident posters would have you believe. sun shadows are parallel to sunlight! it's not a contrail shadow! it's not anticrepuscular rays! it's not heilegenschein, a halo, a corona, the glory, or a rainbow! and besides, none of the various aspects of the phenomenon appear in the photos immediately preceeding and succeeding the photo in question. most of the possibilities discussed would last longer than a few seconds. the bug hypothesis has not been soundly eliminated. otherwise, it must be a photographic artifact. was the photo taken from inside? could the phenomenon be a reflection off the inside of a window? so many great ufo photos were just some guy's watch reflecting off the glass...
According to the timestamps, the before and after are reversed. They are all taken in about 30 seconds. The boat on the right goes from behind the dock to the right, which matches its wake, and the clouds billow up in that order.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
Anyone thought to go and check the light?
"If it has screws, it was meant to be taken apart."
To add to that, the image shows the particle disintegrating in a flash from atmospheric friction within feet of the surface of the Earth.
Therefore, it is NOT the first image of an object striking the Earth.
Considering that ocean covers 75% of our planet I think there are a LOT of things us silly monkeys don't understand about the dominant environment on this planet. It looks like something either shot down or was sent to space or something else along that line. I'd check to see if there are any satelite pics that were taken at the same moment and see if it was one of those ball-lightning 'sprites' or if something entered the atmosphere from that trajectory.
The shadowy 'streak' seems to be some sort of light at a wavelength we can barely see. I'd say it was a streak of carbon from something from space like space-junk or a small meteor but the streak doesn't seem to dissipate with the weather. It looks like some form of light since it's a straight line as opposed to a smoking streak of something...there's my 2 cents...LET THE BASHING BEGIN! :)
Since the timestamps reveal that there are no photos in the series from before the photo with the streak could this be a dissipating vapour trail from a jetliner?
did anyone bother to go actually look at the light in question and examine it.....you know... that real life stuff....
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/
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.
For what it's worth I just did a photoshop diff on the durning and after images and then bumped up the contrast a smidge. The results can be found here: Image Link (5.2 MB JPEG)
||| technological transcendentalist |||
The "flash" looks like the upward moving ground leader from a lightning strike. Those leaders often do not connect to form an actual strike. It actually appears to be coming from the base of the lamp, not the top, which would be the most logical place for a leader to form.
The streak, I'm not so sure. As others have suggested, it could be a contrail "shadow", however, it seems much too straight to be a hair, or even a shadow, as contrails quickly deform. Even if the ground has no wind, upper atmosphere usualy does and contrails will not stay that straight for very long. It does apear to converge (smaller top-left, to larger closest to the flash). But, I could be wrong on that.
-Doug "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
Look at the before and after and there's nothing. Can't be smoke.
Anyone else noticed that the cloud in that re-leveled picture looks like a flying pig?
I'll wager a wild guess that it's a glass bow...
Pretty cool! This makes me think that it's a reflection from a case or a filter of the sky above the camera, with a plane traversing it. The perspective is perfect.
The camera has to have a case of some sort protecting it.
If this isn't a meteor, which I'm not entirely sure why it couldn't be; then it is a shadow from some sort of vapor train that you cannot see in the picture.
I suppose it could also be an amateur rocket fired from the ground and/or an elaborate hoax.
The streak appears when the post blows up. Did anyone notice that post blow up or am I the only one to have look at more than just the streak?
The photo appears to catch three unrelated but remarkably aligned events:
1. A shadow from a contrail. I've seen lots of these here in big sky country and they look exactly like that.
2. A puff of smoke from an engine starting.
3. The streetlight luminaire starting in the twilight and the bulb blowing out with a bright flash. (Note that the streetlight wasn't working when it was investigated).
I don't get it. I've been staring at the images for about 15 minutes, and aside from the hair on the lens, I don't see anything interesting.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I for one welcome our dark streaking, flashing non-terrestial overlords.
Duh.
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
Maybe its a test fire of a satellite defense network. A low power test to see the accuracy of the weapon.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here...
everything has been ruled out! it's a reflection on the window the camera was pointed through! who knows what it was, maybe tracklights, the photographer's toy lightsaber, a beam on the ceiling and a wall sconce... we have to let it go and move on.
The fellow should have checked out the street lamp.
My guess is that the bulb exploded, launching a light projectile towards the upper left hand corner of the picture on a plane that is more or less parallel with the plane of the picture.
Opposite this projectile a much more massive chunk traveled downward and from this peice we see some smoke trails traveling both downward and upward. The downward trails appear to ensnarl the pole somewhat.
Given the shutter speed is about 1/3 of the usual minimum for taking pictures there is ample time for the projectiles to travel the distances we observe.
Another possible explanation is a small pyro device tossed into the air which explodes on this side of the street light. If one looks closely it does appear that some of the smoke is on this side of the street lamp pole. So maybe we had some kids fill a soda bottle with gunpowder and light a fuse and toss it into the air. Checking hospital reports may yeild the clues we need!
Given the size of the long trail into the upper left hand corner however, I suspect that whatever was thrown in this direction was on fire and we are only seeing a vapour/smoke trail that disappears within a few seconds (like 15 for instance). I wonder if sodium from a high pressure sodium lamp can do this.
They've found my oludium-236 explosive space modulator!
It seems to me that the light wasn't working in the "before" picture, either. So the fact that the light doesn't work now isn't really as interesting as it could be.
I know plenty of places that are slow about replacing burnt out street lights!
--LWM
The "light pole" is actually a mast / crane of the ship nearly hidden from view , except for its superstructure off to the left. The bright flash is either a light on the mast or perhaps a flash due to some welding. The gray line is the shadow of a passing aircraft. The shadow is very likely in the distant background, but lines up with the mast. The clouds in the upper right are illuminated by the sun off to the left. Brian Hawes
Seeing the diff reminded me of cool picture i saw on photo site: http://hagar.nomad.ee/pildid/images/3362.jpg :)
Cloud of mosquitos caught in flash. Looks like a flying crosses scene from Pink Floyds "The Wall" movie
The actual site is http://foto.kala.ee/
News story
Here's a picture of damage caused by another meteor
I haven't read anybody mention something about the man getting out of his car in the after photo. If you look at the tree in front of the second all-white building on the left, directly underneath it, you can make out a car. If you look at the before, occurence, and after photos, you can see the man getting out of his car. As to what this means, I'll leave that up to you.
This appears to be exactly what an emergency flare would look like when hitting the water. This flare was not shot straight up, instead at an arch.
Everyone is obviously looking at this the wrong way! As very small aliens (large home planet-heavy gravity being the reason) have all but been proved to exist among us, this is clearly an alien ship LEAVING the planet. Allow me to elaborate.
First: The postion of the smoke and flame coincide with the departure streak.
B: When you factor in the departure angle, Rotation of the earth, postion of the moon and wind direction (based on the wakes in the water) it is the PERFECT time and angle for such a departure. These same conditions would not have come again until 2012!
3: The lamp post CLEARLY is smaller on the top, which is almost always the favored landing zones for these craft. Due to their metallic dome shapes it is nigh imposible to recognize them to the casual observer.
Finaly: Located just 3 miles west of the location is Austraila's 7th largert ball bearing factory. This type of factory will be the first to go when the invasion begins. Rendering all vehicles useless in less than 8 years.
Big E is always here to clear things up.
I definitely don't claim to be an expert, as I only visited this website about a week ago, but it looks kinda like the "contrail shadows" found here:
http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/atoptics/rayshad.htThat doesn't really explain the flash - but that looks unrelated to me anyway.
yeap. i saw it
read the previous posts! it's not a contrail shadow!
Do not test secret doomsday weapon carrying rocket where people can photograph it. Right now I'm only an Angry Scientist. I graduate to Mad after I make a play for world domination.
"My enemies hate me. My allies hate me. I hate myself."
its a hair falling in front of the camera.
There is not enough valid information about the pictures to come up with a sound answer. Although I tend to agree with posts along the lines of the most obvious explanation is probably the correct answer(Occam's razor).
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
This is almost certianly a dead pixel in the camera. It shows all the classic signs of a dead pixel.
I concur that the bulb blew out. The fact that smoke doesn't appear in the following frame is a matter of dispersion and illumination (the bright light from the filament illuminates the smoke in the frame in question). After all, the Sun is low in the sky and the foreground is not well iluminated as a result of clouds. I don't think the streak is a shadow of an out of focus foreground structure, although that's a good hypothesis. The streak apparently ends at the horizon, but this could be a contrast issue. I have attempted to fit a line to the streak. The streak has some curvature to it, which could be the result of distortion in the digital camera lens or the fact that the actual streak is curved (see below). This makes it difficult to determine if the streak intersects the lamp post, but my best fit indicates the extension of the streak below the horizon lies above the lamp post. My best guess is that the streak is the exhaust stream from an aircraft (not a contrail). I have observed numerous sunsets for over 15 years on five different continents. I often see short-lived (less than a few minutes) ray structures (streaks). Sometimes these are the shadows of clouds, other times, the shadows of contrails, or the contrail itself, or the exhaust trail that becomes apparent under only the right conditions of light and contrast. So, my conclusion - you have a combination of two events - an exploding lamp post bulb and an aircraft exhaust trail that becomes apparent under critical lighting conditions. Granted, a bit of a stretch, but more plausible than a meteorite hitting a lamp post. Is the camera pointed in the direction of an airport? Were the pictures taken more than a minute apart? I will agree - a meteorite hitting a lamp post would be very cool, but less plausible than what I am suggesting. jjs
I can't see anything in the picture that could be making such a shadow, BTW.
Play Command HQ online
If he's using a Canon he's obviously used M$ Windows to load the image onto his computer. In order to stop it being file-shared, Windows has added an encrypted line to ensure that the image can only be used on the originating computer...
Now had he used Open Source he would have been fine!
My first impulse was to guess "camera artifact." But some people who are knowledgeable about digital cameras who have posted here seem to doubt that it is; so let's assume that it is not.
It has already been speculated that microscopic black holes sometimes intersect the orbit of the earth, passing through the earth and/or its atmosphere in a few micro or milliseconds.
If the picture's only artifact had been the dark streak, my guess would have been that we were seeing exactly that: the trail created by a microscopic black hole traveling through the atmosphere. This would explain how an object traveling through the atmosphere at high speed could do so without creating great heat (and an atmospheric glow): rather than displacing atmospheric molecules (consequently imparting kinetic energy and creating heat), a black hole would be _absorbing_ them, leaving a partial vacuum in its wake. This vacuum would be visible as the dark streak.
But we also have the flash to contend with. Not just the flash, but also the fact that the flash occurs in a location very near a streetlamp in the picture. For the moment, let's assume that this indicates that the object in question hit the streetlamp.
Let's describe the flash. In addition to the bright region just to the right of the top of the lamppost, there is a dimmer region that is roughly the shape of a squat "T". (This may be a lens artifact, but it may not.) The "top stroke" of the T extends perpendicular to the dark streak, about 3 times the width of the bright part of the flash on either side. The "down stroke" of the T is a halo-ish circular glow just beyond the bright part of the flash along the path of the dark streak.
I do not think that a black hole would explode or decay on impact with matter slightly more dense than the atmosphere. I don't have science to back up this guess, it's just my instinct. Also, while I don't know what a decaying black hole would look like, for some reason I don't think it would look the way this flash does.
So if we need an object with strong gravity to explain the dark path, but we can't use a black hole, what does that leave us? I am going to theorize the existence of something I will call a "Purple Hole." (I just Googled the term, and I don't see that it has been used in astronomy or physics. Apologizes if that turns out to be wrong. Apologizes also to http://ghs.ming.k12.wv.us/Purple_Hole/Gilbert High School.)
A black hole, while exhibiting extreme gravitational effects, is made up of ordinary matter. So the physics used to analyze black holes, and to predict when and under what circumstances they might decay, and what the products might be if they do decay, are based on models where the amount and density of matter is extraordinary, but the matter is not.
But what if the object in question were a mixture containing, in addition to ordinary matter, dark matter and possibly dark energy? We might have an object whose gravitational effects were similar to those of a black hole, but whose behaviors in terms of decay were quite different.
In particular, it is possible that the decay of the object would produce mainly weakly interactive particles. These particles would mostly pass through ordinary matter showing little or no macroscopic effect. This would explain the lack of visible damage to the street light. It might also help to explain the fact that the object decayed at all (whether it struck the streetlamp or not). A microscopic examination of parts of the streetlamp might show paths left by decay particles.
OK, maybe this is silly. But it's fun. Thanks for reading this long post.
Looking at the blowup of the main picture, the light is emenating from a standard power pole. Closer inspection shows a central blast arch, with a larger surrounding blast arch - dust or steam billowing out at an angle from behind the pole.
From what I see, it appears a transformer on the backside of the power pole blew up - causing the flare; the picture was taken miliseconds after the explosion.
The line on the image in the sky is probably the artifact of a lens flare, caused by the intense light at the moment of maximum light output - a milisecond before the picture was snapped and scanned - leaving the artifact behind.
If I was able to visit that location, I would examine the power pole at the point and see if there is no residue from a transformer blow-up or other malfunction of power lines at that location.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I was privy to the first 10 pages of original discussion, so hopefully I can add some helpful insight to this mystery.
.5m (~19in) during the exposure. The only problem is that in the incorrectly-labelled after photo, there appears to be a small amount of white smoke around the base of the pole.
1. It is not a contrail shadow, nor any sort of shadow related to the sun. The sun is off the upper *right* of the picture, as evidenced by the clouds.
2. The original post stated that the lamp-post was inspected and showed no damage, only that the light did not work. The light had not exploded, so theories to that effect are lost causes (sorry.)
3. Upon closer inspection, the "lamp-post" actually appears to be the mast of a ship. The lamp-posts are regularly spaced and taller than the pole the streak ends on.
4. A photo-analyst (or so he claimed) mentioned that the color of the flash at the end of the streak was definitely related to the color of the light reflecting off the water. The consequences of this, however, were not explained. *shrug*
All in all, the most convincing theory I have heard is that it is a winged insect passing in front of the camera. A quick google shows the fastest it could be going is ~10 m/s, which would have it travelling a maximum of
Cognitate on!
Move along, there's nothing to see here.
That? That was swamp gas.
Move along...
I, for one, welcome our new pole-flashing alien overlords!
Look up strangelets
The forumsetup to discuss it is currently hosed, so perhaps fellow slashdotters can shed some light over the mystery?"
Yeah, it's definitely hosed.
I'm glad I'm out here in the middle of nowhere.. They'll never come here for.. *connection terminated*
Think of it like this: you take a flash picture of someone in pitch black, it doesn't matter if the shutter is set at 1/2 second, the exposure will only be as long as the flash (~1/40.000th second).
That being said, the flash *is* actually blurred. IF you look at it, it looks blurred radially outwards. With the center being to the bottom right and more intense (indicating motion, but also explosion during motion).
I personally think the plume of smoke has nothing to do with the artifact. I also have a hunch that tells me the flash is actually a much smaller object way *in front* of the lamp post. (not further behind). Don't ask me why, it's just a hunch.
If I were to rationally come up with a hypthesis, I'd be inclined to say it's a firework-like object that blew up and never hit the water. That's what the flash looks like. Although, the trajectory indicates too high speed to be a firework. Maybe ammunition, or a fighter jet flare of some sort?
Blow up the pic a bit, and you'll see that it's several pixels off to the right of the pole.
As seen/explained here:t ml
http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Plume.h
Note I haven't looked into the EXIF data at all from the images, but it would be interesting to see what the apeture of the camera is in the mystery picture as compared to the other two.
Anyhow. There's my theory. Maybe that's it?
troon is absolutely right - this thing is a bug flying across the field of view, illuminated by a flash.
There is a certain class of crackpot who thinks that out of focus pictures of insects flying across a photoframe are evidence of some strange unknown creature.
Fortunately, we can visit their websites and laugh at them. Unfortunately, they can now point at the Astronomy Picture of the Day and say "See! NASA found more evidence for rods!"
Link to roswellrods.com - don't forget your tin foil hat, and your annoying-flash-website spelunking equipment.
Link to an actual sane person describing the phenomenon
More discussion
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
You haven't seen these? When an airplane contrail is aligned with the setting sun, its shadow casts a straight dark line across the sky, pointing to the point opposite of where the sun is setting. I see them a lot in Silicon Valley.
I must've mistyped this URL.
Any chance that this is just a clever Photoshop hoax? It looks from the picture like a street light blew up. Why didn't this dude run down to the pier and take a picture of the damage?
-R
It looks like it could be a static spark in the camera. In the right conditions, the act of advancing the film can generate enough static to cause a spark in the camera and expose the film. It is just a coincidence, that the spark happened at the top of the light pole. There is what looks to me like lightning around the light pole, that is to big to have gone unnoticed by onlookers. The line could be a result of the spark or something unrelated in the processing.
After further analysis and applying advanced image enhancement techniques, this image will make clear what the cause of this is. http://webpages.charter.net/gohome/strange_pryde_b ig.jpg
the there appear that the pole is a power line pole, and not a street lamp.
there is no light in the before picture, like the other street lamps
the smoke is both rising and falling
and the smoke is in front of the lamp.
it seems to me that something behind the trees gave off some smoke (steam?) and a puff happened to catch the sun just right.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
- Pictures before and after do not show the streak. You would think that the smoke trail would linger in the air for a while thereafter.
- The edges of the smoke streak are what seems to be perfectly straight. Against, atmnospheric turbulance should cause the edges to be slightly billowed and/or irregular
- The edges of the streak should be more like a long thin cone, indicating an expansion of the smoke plume as time passes with the transit of the proposed meteorite through the atmosphere. In the photo, the edges of the smoke plume are parrallel to each other.
- The flash of light shows a seemingly symmetrical splash of light at right angles to the path of the streak. An impact would have hot particles going off at various angles, shedding sparks and light depending on the angle of impact.
- Vaporization would tend to be omni directional, modified by the speed of transit/impact.
The secret to good photoshopping is attention to details."It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Its Dr Evil re-entering the atmosphere!
We're Dooooooomeed!
look at yellow part of artifact;
look at bright cloud;
look at shiny red spot in bottom left of lake
(centered at x=888 y=1346, it's pretty round);
my guess is that it could be a piece of glass
floating on the lake, reflecting a part of the
sky on the lens of the camera;
the streack could be caused by movement of this
object on water;
so, the blue part of artifact should be the
reflection of the sky, but its shape is weird.
Maybe due to shape of the floating object.
The other solution is that an alien drowning in
the lake emitted a laser signal (shiny spot) to
its orbital spaceship to send a rescue
capsule (the artifact).
Which direction was Cassiopia?
.
Where do the souls of street lamps go when they die?
Ok, bigger than a bottle rocket, launched from off to the left at a low tradjectory over the bay, exploding as it approached the ground. Shutter happened to release right when the firework exploded.
That would explain the lack of obvious physical damage to the lamp then.
Keith D.
Of course, it's the skybox!
Wouldn't have happened if they had been using the Half-life 2 engine.
Yeah, it looks like a firefly, flying up to the left during the picture, and maybe a little bit towards the camera. Alternately, is could be a bug captured by the flash at the beginning of the picture, fading out as it flew up to the left.
They welcomed our dark streaking, flashing non-terrestial overlords 2 years ago ... In Japan!
In Soviet Russia, dark streaking, flashing non-terrestial overlords welcome YOU!
In Korea, only Old People welcome dark streaking, flashing non-terrestial overlords
These aren't the dark streaking, flashing non-terrestial overlords you're looking for...
[/me waves goodbye to karma]
Required reading for internet skeptics
Surely - lightbulb "blew" (exploded, formed a minimininova) & threw shadow of lampstandard, lampshade or whatever, UP into sky through evening mist; thus making the mist visible. The principle being that sparrows are more common than canaries, perhaps even in Oz. Question now - why did the bulb "blow"?
"The light pole near the flash has been inspected and does not show any damage, although the light inside was not working."
I bet the light in the light pole blew, and when it did flashed brightly. the picture was taken at just the right moment to catch the flash, and in doing so got some glare on the lens.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
After a bit of research (reading the article) I found this link
Someone may have mentioned this already, I haven't had time to look through all the posts. But, did anyone notice the haze around the light? At first I thought it was steam from a building and didn't think much of it, then I realized the towering cumulus cloud in the background isn't a cold weather cloud, at least not in weather cold enough to make steam obvious. After I saw the before and after pictures and noticed that the haze wasn't present there... I'd say I have to go with the bug theory. It seems perfectly possible the flash illuminated a shiny bug as it was flying by and perhaps the haze if a reflection off the wings? I'd also have to say that it seems unlikely that its an "explosion". I own a Canon G5 (which is basically a G3 with one more megapixel) and it suffers from hellified chromatic aberation. I've seen happen from own flash on objects 30-40 feet away. I'd say whatever the light source was in that picture had to have been rather diffuse otherwise there would've been "purple fringing"
You would be correct if the streak was a smoke trail.
More likely, it is the falling (or rising) object exposed over time (1/19 sec).
My favorite theory is that it is a rising bug. The spark at the lowest point is a reflection of the camera flash (it did flash).
The position of the lightpole is a coincidence.
It's somebody lighting a cigarette while in a cloaked romulan warbird. One of the old kinds. . . with the shoddy cloaking devices.
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
I think it might be a raindrop streaking across in front of the camera lens, reflecting the sunlit sky. It looks like it's about to rain. The wind would cause the raindrop to slant. It's just a coincidence that the lamppost is in the same location as the raindrop's reflection.
I think I can prove it isn't a bug. If you look at the before-during-after photos in sequence, there is some specular highlighting that goes on in the foreground during the flash. This means that the light of the flash was reflected off the ground. Look closely, and you'll see several pixels light up in the "parking lot" area during the "blast".
So any solution that relies on the flash being very close to the camera has to be wrong, unless you can explain the reflection off the asphault of the parking lot some other way.
Great link. Cecil Adams knows all.
I am really suprised that nobody has suggested what I thought of. The lighter "thing" at the tip of the light post looks like some kind of a spirit. The dark line was it's flight path and it went throught the light causing it to malfunction. Just my thoughts...
I am not sure that we can definitely resolve this (it would be a surprise to me if I could given the small amount of information available), but this discussion doesn't seem to be following very strict logic, and perhaps I can help a bit there. To begin with, we should all keep in mind that to have the discussion at all we must discount hoaxes both by and *upon* the photographer. We must make this leap of faith (no offense intended to Mr Pryde), but should always keep it in the back of our minds. Having taken this step, lets not forget (as many here seem to have done) what data we are offered. For example, the lamp "in" the fireball "was not working" after the picture. I think we can presume that we would have been explicitly told if it had been exploded or melted, and we were not. It is not possible for me, at least, to definitively determine the scale of the event. It does seem to me that if the fireball was real, and had enveloped the lamp, there would likely remain some sign of it. Likewise if it was real and exploded behind the lamp, we would hope to see the lamp outlined in it. Neither is the case. Thus it seems likely that the event happened *in front of* the lamp. If this is the case, then we have no reason to think that the event was very big, and in fact if it was very close to the camera it might have been quite small. A close look at the fireball shows a clear/white "shock wave" somewhat separate from the yellow fireball itself. If the lens opened a bit before the flash was taken, and if the fireball was quite close to the camera, then we can imagine (as one possibility) something coming obliquely at the camera across the little bay, exploding in front of the camera just as the lens opened, leaving a small cloud of smoke or dust in a shock front which was then illuminated by the flash. I do not say "this is what happened". And I have heard experts say this could not have been a meteor. But if a small meteor *nearly* hit the ground but the last remnant exploded (admittedly producing no fragments, so it wasn't likely a iron meteor. Perhaps it was just an icy remnant of a more complex body) near the front of the camera, coincidentally in line with the lamp post, it seems that the result would look very much like this picture. The fact that it was closer, and thus smaller than it appears, might explain why there are no signs of the explosion or trail in the next frame, 15 seconds later, as one might expect if the event were larger and farther away. If we accept that the event was small and close to the camera, we can probably find other explanations, but I confess that I like the small meteorite explanation best given the circumstances. ./Leigh Clayton [Toronto, Canada]
Someone run out to that dock and check the light and dock for damage.
It's the shadow of a contrail. The atmosphere has some haze, so the sunlight is reflecting off the air in all areas but the contrail shadow.
The list portion of the cloud on the right indicates that the sun is above and to the left of the photo, exactly where it would be to make such a shadow.
As a pilot, I've seen this while flying a couple of times, and a few times from the ground. Watch carefully the next time a contrail is exactly in line with the sun (so from your POV the contrail crosses the sun).
This leads me to suspect that the sun reflected intermittently in the glass of the lamp. The tiny "smoke" trail you see around the light looks very much like the light trails that are generated by a point source, such as a candle flame, when a camera vibrates a bit during an exposure.
How could a reflection be intermittent? I suppose if the top of the light pole was moving around a bit, say from wind or waves, you could have this happen.
This does not explain the diagonal streak, but a plausible explanation is that the streak is a lens flare from the point flash.
Xcott
It's Moya.
If you double-click the image a few times, it expands, right? Well, I did that a couple of times and I think that I know what it is. I've seen people who said it was a light from a pole, a meteor, an insect; I've seen a whole bunch of things. The insect theory doesn't really hold up when you think about it; how do you explain the flash of light? A trick of the light and/or light from the poles doesn't explain it either; a trick of the light would be more spread out, and none of the other poles are lit up like that, so the only thing that could be happening there is an exploding bulb. I think that the streak is a piece of hair or something, but that it's unrelated to the flash of "light". I think it rather unlikely that the "light" is natural at all. My theory is that the film was damaged or mishandled at some point. It looks like a flaw in the film close up, particularly the "mist" around the light pole. It may have been slightly torn or something. If that were a natural phenomenon, you would have SEEN it; it would've been visible to the naked eye. Yet the photographer saw nothing, and nothing showed up on pictures taken immediately before and after this image. This is why I think that this is the most likely theory.
Yes, of course it would be possible for someone to use a JPEG tagger program to alter the meta-data of a photoshopped file. But would you think to do this? I wouldn't have. And for a mundane sort of mystery like this picture presents, why would you bother? There is no fame or fortune to be had by this photographer. Would you go not only to the trouble to photoshop the streak and flash into the picture, but also to cover your tracks by restoring the meta-data to fool people who look at the file with a binary editor or JPEG comment reader?
On the other hand, this does raise an interesting question of how could one check that an image had been digitally edited? Modern digital cameras usually are configured to compress the image (to JPEG or some other compressed form) before they even store it to flash memory. I wonder if there are particular tell-tale signs of repeated JPEG compression, like what would happen when the compressed camera image is decompressed, edited, and recompressed. It also may be possible to figure out which software produced the JPEG file by quirks of different implementations of the JPEG compression algorithm. The JPEG standard leaves room for different compressors to choose different data to discard to perform lossy compression, and it may be possible to determine from which data remains enough information to figure out what software produced the file.
there are no mention of the direction of the streak or the location of the photograph taken. but suprise suprise I see B52's
regularly fly (thursdays at 0700 and 1600) a route E-NNW and visa versa which I presume is changeover crews to/from Diego Garcia (Camp Justice) leaving contrails. So it is possible that such trails exist on non comercial traffic routes. In the absence of commercial traffic at this height/direction (above 35'000 ft) If you not aware of the time/directions you may mistake it for something else.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11 599504%255E28102,00.html
Is it just me or is this not the first sighting.
Hair on the lens. The flash may be the end of the hair catching some sunlight (squint facing the sun and see the glare off your eye lashes to see what I mean.)
These frames are probably time-lapse, and so the hair blew onto the lens... snap a picture was taken... the hair blew away again... snap another picture.
"That's exactly what I said, only different."
It's the seam in the sky. See the ST:TOS "The earth is hollow for I have touched the sky"
I am so Smart, S-M-R-T, I mean S-M-A-R-T
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
The streak is caused by a swarm of cockroaches. I learned about this on the X-Files last night.
According to the metadata in the pictures, they were taken 15 secs apart:
Nov 22, 2004
18:52:37
18:52:52
18:53:07
Cheers,
Psychoned
According to these exif headers in the parent post, the picture is JPEG, a compressed format. Without the RAW picture to analze, I'd pass the "tail" off as a possible artifact created by the JPEG creation software inside the camera as it dealt with the bright spot.
Lights don't always burn out instantly, they can _burn_, which includes creating smoke. Depending on the conditions and that we're likely talking about a large filiment (like you see in the metal halide and similar industrial bulbs) it wouldn't surprise me if it burnt brightly for several seconds before (and into) when the picture was taken. This would explain seeing smoke and the bright light at the same time.
The only thing left is ensuring that it's an appropriate time of day for lights to be on. It looks like some of the lights are on, and that it's dusk/dawn (the exif headers corroborate that it is dusk). Dusk is when automatic lights turn on.
We're possibly seeing nothing more than a bulb burning out (during turn-on or soon there after, which would be a reasonable time given that this is when most bulbs have problems) and a JPEG artifact.
I would like to see a picture from the night before and night after (they would likely show that that light is worked the one day and not the next, unless the maintanance guys are quick).
So many weird explanations.
Assuming it's not a doctored photo then to me it just looks like a meteorite impacting the water.
With the angle of the sun and the sparse but dense clouds I would say the explosion/flash is just the sun reflecting off a splash of water.
Look in the before/after pictures and you can see a small wave creating the same type of effect from the sun off the water.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
the sun is slow on the horizon, could be opposite that angle.. if it was something moving it would show an arc with gravitational pull.. nothing moves that fast. it's clearly a lens flare or reflection of some sort.
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
That sounds about 50,000 times less likely than space debris that _just_ grazes the post (or hits the water behind; not touching the lamp-post)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It looks a lot like a seabird caught by the flashgun (bright flash == the eyes, 'smoke' around the light is the body + wings), with the dark streak being the bird exiting stage left. To get the eyes lit up the bird must have been flying towards the camera and must have been quite close to leave such a long streak. EXIF info in the images indicates that the exposure was long (1/20sec); a bird would probably cover about a metre-ish in that time, so the distance to the end of the track from the camera would have to be quite small (~a couple of metres). Or it could be a particle beam from one of those star wars satellites getting a bit trigger happy :-)
I also performed gimp-magic on the photos and obtained the following results:
.05 seconds, which means that if the object were as distant as the light post, it would be travelling at roughly 420 km/h, which is a decent estimate of terminal velocity. What concerns me most about this idea of things falling from the sky is the (apparently) flash and smoke at the bottom, which strikes me as highly uncharacteristic of projectiles hitting things which are not broken.
The streak is 1150 pixels long and lasts for
Incidentally, 420 km/h is also a good estimate of the typical speed of a model rocket. The flash and smoke do look rather familiar to me as the shape you see when launching such rockets, although I would also expect the smoke plume at the bottom to be the same color as the smoke streak, which it clearly is not. I'm also not certain what variety of geek prefers to launch his model rockets from the tops of lightposts.
I'm going to have to cast my vote now for "random defocused object illuminated by flash," mainly because there are, despite our efforts, still vastly more insects in the world than there are geeks with such strange habits.
I read the title as "A Strange Steak Imaged in Australia.
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
I believe this is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, it does not respond to EM fields, it just flys through the universe until it strikes somthing dense, like the ocean, creating a small explosion
It's certainly a bit suspicious. Looking at the EXIF tags, I don't understand why the time of taking/digitizing of the picture decreases with each successive picture. Also, those times (18:53:07, 18:52:52, and 18:52:37) suggest 15 seconds between each shot, not just a few, which can also be seen from the high cloud in the middle. Thus the boat to the far right is not "speeding", it is crawling forward at a low speed, and the reason the other boat is moving slightly is because it's drifting.
Taking a look at the flash, it doesn't appear to be that bright. Basically, it's a yellowish blotch that partially obscures the pole nearest it.
Looking at the long streak, we can note a few things: although slightly difficult to determine, the streak extends over the sky, slightly over the horizon, but not all the way to the flash; it's perfectly straight; it has an even width all across, and even intensity except the top part; it appears to fade out at the top end, and has disappeared by and even before the edge of the photo.
Finally, the fuzz, or "mist" just to the right of the flash. It is not perpendicular to the long streak; it has a almost straight, but not curved, form. The form is like a line, just slightly bent in the middle towards the flash, with smaller, perpendicular oval blobs at the ends in the direction of the flash, and a curvation in the middle that goes around the flash. The middle curvation has a slightly square, not-quite-round shape.
All of the really small details I mention could be false, due to the heavy compression, but the larger facts are definitely facts. I'm unsure if the pictures are recompressed. All the EXIF tags are intact, except for a mention of ACDsee, and a later modification date, probably the upload date from the camera. I don't know if the Canon PowerShot G3 can produce images with this much compression and low quality, but since it's not a cheapo camera, I highly doubt it. The camera was on auto-mode, which might explain the color and brightness change in the last picture.
My Explanations:
a) Something fell from the sky.
Maybe, probably not. Different points on the trail are obviously not at different distances from the camera (even width), thus, the object has to be moving. The "shockwave" or "bow wave" in front of the object is not perpendicular to its path, and is also straight, not bow-formed. In any case, it's not coming from the clouds in the distance.
b) Lightning.
Unlikely. Doesn't explain the straight streak, doesn't explain why the smoke is below the flash, or spread out as it is while the flash is still occuring.
c) Streak/mist is a sensor or lens artefact.
Unlikely. Definitely not a sensor artefact, those do not come in diagonal versions. The mist could possibly resemble some lens flare, but is only on the right side of a fairly weak flash. The streak is darker than the background, lens flares are brighter.
d) The lamp blew out.
Unlikely. Explains the flash, and possibly the mist (or smoke), but shows the middle finger to the long straight streak. The streak is unlikely a shadow, since there's nothing to cast a shadow on in the middle of the air. The streak is, again, of even width all across, perpendicular to the camera lens axis. The thin streak is also not a shadow of a long pole.
e) It's a fake.
Likely.
Any comments, corrections?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Clouds always billow inwards in the southern hemisphere.
Look guys.. Assuming its not a hoax, it's clear something hit the top of that post. The brightest area of the flash is to the bottom right of the very top of the post, which is consistent with a high-speed object coming in from the top left of the image, hitting the post, and producing a flash to the bottom-right of the impact point. Even the cloud around the flash is in the right direction, perpendicular to the dark streak. The dark streak is consistent, and the exposure would be darker so long as the moving object is not on fire or giving off light itself. My advise: Inspect the post! To say that "the street light doesn't work" is not nearly enough info! The lightbulb doesn't have to smash to produce a flash from a high-speed object. It most likely hit the steel pole, or the steel cover on the >top of the bulb dome. It could have just nicked the post at the top. My advice: 1) Climb to the top. 2) Take high-res pictures all over the top of the post. 3) Collect dust and look at it under a microscope. 4) Compare to neighboring posts. I'd like to know what it is too...
Chemtrail people will tell you the dark is streak is know as DOR. The bright flash is a portal.
Your assignment Mr.Phelps is to find out what this DOR is.
Cliff
The answer is obvious. The camera caught the exact moment that the lightbulb burned out. When a lightbulb burns out it emits a bright flash of light. Ever see one burn out at home when the switch is turned on. The streak is caused by the cameras reaction to the bright flash of light from the bulb.
The answer is obvious.
The camera caught the exact moment that the lightbulb burned out. When a lightbulb burns out it emits a bright flash of light. Ever see one burn out at home when the switch is turned on.
The streak is caused by the cameras reaction to the bright flash of light from the bulb.
Looks like the aussies are testing the Mobile Tactical High-Energy Laser (MTHEL), Missle Defense System.
Why doesn't someone just bother to look at the fucking street lamp which was supposedly shattered and solve the goddamn "problem"?
:P
Fucking scientists.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The camera caught the exact moment that the lightbulb burned out. When a lightbulb burns out it emits a bright flash of light. Ever see one burn out at home when the switch is turned on.
The streak is caused by the cameras reaction to the bright flash of light from the bulb.
Intersection
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I can see that the area of 851,1029, (the streetlight that is still lit)-- is the EXACT same in the 2nd and 3rd frame. You can even see the box-shaped halo around the area.
Why didn't noise affect this area like it did for every other pixel-- it was copied and pasted!
On November 26, maybe it was the 27th, I was in rural Minnesota enjoying a camp fire with a two other people.
At approximately 2 a.m., central timezone, we observed a very distinct black streak in the clouds. The moon was backlighting the clouds. The streak was moving sideways across the clouds.
After discussing the phenomena we thought it may have been the shadow of a high level aircraft contrail cast upon the tops of the clouds.
I think in Minnesota there are military aircraft stationed in St. Paul, Minneapolis and Duluth.
It was very eerie to watch!
CrossIPTC software for digital pictures is a repair and cross-platform conversion tool to efficiently exchange IPTC metadata using extended characters between Windows and Macintosh platforms. CrossIPTC rewrites IPTC accents for Windows when created by a Macintosh computer [or vice-versa] to ensure compatibility and properly display author, captions, keywords, categories, credits and origins information containing texts with accents. Some CrossIPTC Features : - Mass conversion of extended characters into IPTC fields. - Translates Macintosh accents to Windows accents or Windows accents to Macintosh characters. - Works with all standard IPTC fields and with customised (non-standard) fields - Displays IPTC metadata information for each image - Lets you copy image IPTC data set to clipboard when browsing folder images. - Allows to display captured IPTC character strings, in Hexadecimal values - Optionally keeps a copy of input files to a backup folder. - Customization of period interval between two scans for processing - Language: English Designed to facilitate images and digital photos transmission, CrossIPTC enables automatic stock photography conversion during migration from one platform to another executing a mass repair on IPTC File Info fields added to JPEG or TIFF pictures: it translates Macintosh extended characters to Windows characters or Windows accents to Macintosh accents. Since extended characters are absolutely necessary for example in French, German, Portuguese and Spanish texts, no more need to avoid the use of accents for the description of digital pictures to treat by the other platform: the images are always tagged with appropriate accuracy to allow a good cataloguing and indexation. CrossIPTC works with all standard IPTC fields and with customised (non-standard) fields.
Other similar tools are available, of course, and could be well known to a photo geek. Of course, selling the rights to the photo means hundreds if not thousands of dollars in reproduction rights. Nothing outrageous. Just extra beer money.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
By overlaying the next photo in the series on top of an inverted version of the main image, it is evident the mystery vapor is between the pole and the tree.
So, on the imaginary z axis, it goes like this: 1. Camera, 2. Tree, 3. Mystery Vapor, 4. Pole, 5. Water, 6. Horizon.
I've done some photoshop on the picture an the "flash" and "smoke" is actually a bug, the head body and wings are clearly visible:
I've actually seen hundreds of these, but I've never seen one captured (film or digital image). It's not a freak camera malfunction or some one's hoax - they are real. They always transverse at about the same inclination: I've never seen a truly vertical one. What are they? I think they are probably conduits to heaven for souls, but noone's going to buy that.
Well done! Clearly a bug! Or, as we like to say in the biz, "an undocumented feature".
I've wasted a lot of money in my life, the rest I spent on motorcycles and women.
As they used to say: suck it & see.i.e.Experiment: Arrange to blow a bulb in light on similar weather day at same place & time & film or video it. If same streak results well & good & all Slashdot scienists, philosophers & assorted jokers can shut up. If no streak keep repeating experiment till get one as this joker thinks you're certain to get it sooner or later, depending on weather. To blow bulb: switch power off, screw in a coin under bulb(in my day for house lights it used to be a sixpenny piece)switch power on -- beautiful flash!!! But another coin will do If Oz iz out of 6d pieces, or a correctly folded piece of silver paper. If you have friends at the local power station, municipal/port/park electricity switch the on/off problem is easy, if not then interest the local/world media & it may come to pass. But for God's sake shut up & try it.