I took this out at Red Rock, just out of Las Vegas a couple of months ago (lovely place by the way - Red Rock, not Vegas).
I was wondering if anyone had any idea what the object is in the top left of the picture
It looks like you caught a fireball in mid-fall. Just a meteor.
Was the original picture digital or did you scan a photograph?
My first thought is that it looks like something stuck to the negative while it was being processed, but obviously that only works if you were using a film camera.
Probably a fireball, but also not totally dissimilar to an Iridium flare (q.v.: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://pictures.ed-morana.com/IridiumFlares/IridFlare2.jpg&imgrefurl=http://pictures.ed-morana.com/IridiumFlares/&h=600&w=800&sz=301&hl=en&start=6&um=1&usg=__bCCIokYNW5WLU5VH2viCNKrpY-I=&tbnid=34JjFMXcoETYDM:&tbnh=107&tbnw=143&prev=/images%3Fq%3Diridium%2Bflare%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff)
Swamp gas from a weather balloon got trapped in a thermal pocket and refracted the light from Venus.
Tell us a bit more about how the photograph was taken - what processes has this image undergone, please.
Did you see anything there when you took the picture? It doesn’t look real to me, like a lens flare or some kind of digital artifact.
Digital camera. Took it myself and it’s not retouched (I may have cropped it a little).
I didn’t see anything when I took it either. I have my doubts about it being lens flare though. That tends to be a broader expanse of light in my (limited) experience.
Thanks. I was wondering if it might have been a hard copy at some point - which would introduce a whole bunch of possible explanations…
Here is a crop of the relevant part of the image, enlarged a little and (from right to left): normal, inverted, edge emphasised and contrast-boosted.
If it’s only ever been a digital image… Well, let’s break down the possibilities…
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- It’s an image of a real phenomenon
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- It’s a flaw in the hardware / firmware / data
I think we can pretty much dismiss 2 - faults in the sensor tend to align themselves with the pixel array geometry, faults arising in the data after image capture again don’t tend to look so natural as this.
so…
1.1 - It was a static discharge or some other phenomenon directly stimulating the sensor
1.2 - It’s a flaw in the lens
1.3 - It’s a normal optical artefact of the lens
1.4 - It’s a smear of something on the front of the lens
1.5 - It’s a real object moving across the field of view
Again, I don’t see a blip on the sensor making such a blobby, organic shape as this.
If it were a flaw in the lens, it would manifest on other photos you’ve taken - and you haven’t mentioned this, so I’m assuming there are no other instances.
Doesn’t look like lens flare to me (again, not really geometric enough).
It could be a smear or droplet of something on the lens, although if it didn’t manifest on photos taken immediately before and after, that seems less likely.
So I think the most likely explanation is that it is a real object in motion in the field of view.
1.5.1 - Something small, fairly near the lens - an insect, a nugget of bird poop, someone spitting?
1.5.2 - Something larger, but still fairly close - a thrown stone, a bird?
1.5.3 - Something big and/or self-illuminated, at or beyond focal infinity
Does the original image have any EXIF data indicating the shutter speed? (I’m assuming it would have been quite a fast one as the lighting appears quite bright)
I vote for a fiber of some kind stuck to the lens. I’ve been darkroom developing and dabbling in photography for a long time, and this really looks like something very close to the lens or stuck to it. Optically, it just dosen’t look like something in the distance to me. Anyone wearing something fuzzy that day?