I'm just reporting that it sure LOOKS like the camera was panning diagonally, perhaps because somebody was looking at something lower down and tilted it up to look at the pier again. The overflow then would traverse the image in the opposite direction of the pan, the same as fatigue marks in your eyes would if you looked at an accidental arc lamp.
Other reasons for overflows to travel diagonally would include physical details of the CCD design as well as accidental reflections inside the camera. Other common causes for faint diagonal marks of that sort include hairs floating in front of the camera too close to be in focus. There are many possibilities which do not involve an object (never found) moving diagonally towards or away from the pier, and of those, I find the explanation in which the camera moved and paused just before the image was recorded involves the least bit of coincidence and unexplained entities. But considering the rest of the discussion, I'm not surprised that my suggestion is not taken very seriously.
I think it's a small explosion right near the lamp, probably a wire shorting out on a power line nearby. The diagonal streak looks to me like CCD (digital video camera cell) overflow which occurred while the camera was panned from the lower left to the upper right just before the image capture; the CCDs were still recovering from
the overflow when the image was captured. Remember, on digital cameras, there's usually no shutter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just reporting that it sure LOOKS like the camera was panning diagonally, perhaps because somebody was looking at something lower down and tilted it up to look at the pier again. The overflow then would traverse the image in the opposite direction of the pan, the same as fatigue marks in your eyes would if you looked at an accidental arc lamp.
Other reasons for overflows to travel diagonally would include physical details of the CCD design as well as accidental reflections inside the camera. Other common causes for faint diagonal marks of that sort include hairs floating in front of the camera too close to be in focus. There are many possibilities which do not involve an object (never found) moving diagonally towards or away from the pier, and of those, I find the explanation in which the camera moved and paused just before the image was recorded involves the least bit of coincidence and unexplained entities. But considering the rest of the discussion, I'm not surprised that my suggestion is not taken very seriously.
I think it's a small explosion right near the lamp, probably a wire shorting out on a power line nearby. The diagonal streak looks to me like CCD (digital video camera cell) overflow which occurred while the camera was panned from the lower left to the upper right just before the image capture; the CCDs were still recovering from the overflow when the image was captured. Remember, on digital cameras, there's usually no shutter.