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jupiterbeings Grey Joined: 04 Mar 2013 Total posts: 26 Location: Aquila Gender: Male |
 Posted: 13-08-2013 00:39 Post subject: Giant matchstick UFO caught in photo |
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I was outside on 2nd august taking pictures of clouds. When I uploaded the pics to my PC I found a strange looking object which I have named the Giant matchstick UFO. Check it out and tell me what you think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZwzZZIKbFw |
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| Peripart is only passing through
Great Old One Joined: 01 Aug 2005 Total posts: 3851 Age: 45 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 13-08-2013 09:57 Post subject: |
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Interesting, although the music accompanying the vid was so relaxing, I kept forgetting to look at the "matchstick"!
A nicely anomalous object, to be sure. Don't suppose it's an alien ship, but I can't imagine what it is, either. |
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| kamalktk Great Old One Joined: 05 Feb 2011 Total posts: 705 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 13-08-2013 14:04 Post subject: |
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| Perseid meteor show currently. |
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| Ronson8 Things can only get better.
Great Old One Joined: 31 Jul 2001 Total posts: 6061 Location: MK Gender: Male |
| Posted: 13-08-2013 15:55 Post subject: |
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| Yep, looks like a meteor and the dark part is it's path through the cloud layer, actually probably a meteorite if it got that far without burning up. |
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| OneWingedBird Great Old One Joined: 19 Nov 2012 Total posts: 542 Location: Attice of blinkey lights Age: 44 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 13-08-2013 16:01 Post subject: |
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I was thinking more of a tiny hair or something on the lens.  |
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| kamalktk Great Old One Joined: 05 Feb 2011 Total posts: 705 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 13-08-2013 16:03 Post subject: |
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| If jupiterbeings remembers which direction the camera was facing, it would not be especially difficult to determine if the path was coming from the origin point of the Perseids. |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 13-08-2013 17:22 Post subject: |
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| kamalktk wrote: | | If jupiterbeings remembers which direction the camera was facing, it would not be especially difficult to determine if the path was coming from the origin point of the Perseids. |
You'd need to know the camera direction and the time the photo was taken. That info might actually prove that it didn't come from the Perseid's radiant, but it still might be a meteor. There are erratics out there, which might once have been part of a swarm of meteoroids, most of which have now been captured or deflected so that there's no longer a regular meteor shower to be seen.
So I'll go along with the meteor (or re-entering orbital debris) plus smoke trail theory.
(A hair on the lens does not form an image, btw - it's inside the focal length.) |
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| jupiterbeings Grey Joined: 04 Mar 2013 Total posts: 26 Location: Aquila Gender: Male |
| Posted: 13-08-2013 21:10 Post subject: Giant matchstick UFO caught in photo |
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OK. I took this photo as I thought that some mammatus clouds were forming.
It was at approx 5pm in the afternoon on the 2nd of August. I did not see anything whilst taking the picture. So with that information I think we can rule out a meteor. There are certainly not many meteors spotted in the daytime compared to night sightings, it would have to be a big event to see something like that. (I wish  )
Oh and no hairs on me or my camera HAha! |
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| kamalktk Great Old One Joined: 05 Feb 2011 Total posts: 705 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 13-08-2013 21:43 Post subject: Re: Giant matchstick UFO caught in photo |
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| jupiterbeings wrote: |
It was at approx 5pm in the afternoon on the 2nd of August. |
What direction was the camera facing? |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 13-08-2013 22:29 Post subject: Re: Giant matchstick UFO caught in photo |
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| jupiterbeings wrote: | OK. I took this photo as I thought that some mammatus clouds were forming.
It was at approx 5pm in the afternoon on the 2nd of August. I did not see anything whilst taking the picture. So with that information I think we can rule out a meteor. There are certainly not many meteors spotted in the daytime compared to night sightings, it would have to be a big event to see something like that. |
But meteors only exist for bare seconds - if you were taking a picture of clouds, you probably did miss seeing this with the naked eye. And the object is not really noticeable until you zoom into the picture.
(I often say that my digital pics often contain things that "I didn't notice at the time"!)
But, on average, just as many meteors fall in daytime as at night. You may well have got a rare picture of this happening.
It wasn't a big event, or more people would have reported it. (At night, more people might have seen it, and it might also have been caught on some CCTV cams.)
Check whether your nearest uni has an astronomy department, and let them have a look at the pic. If they don't have a meteor specialist, they'll probably know of one. You could make a name for yourself! |
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| IamSundog The FTMB member previously known as Sundog
Great Old One Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Total posts: 1590 Location: Right here Gender: Male |
| Posted: 14-08-2013 02:08 Post subject: |
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I'm pretty dubious about the meteor explanation too. I know daylight meteor sightings are possible but...1) if I'm not mistaken meteors burn in the upper atmosphere well above the clouds, except for the very rare large ones that crash or nearly do...and a large daylight meteor would have been VERY noticeable; 2) even at a fast shutter speed a meteor in a photo would appear as a streak of light, not a bright orb followed by a contrail; 3) I've never seen a meteor photo or read of an observation resembling this.
When I first looked at it, I thought of those "rod" photos, and that maybe this was similalry an artifact of the shutter speed and something moving fast across the field of view. But that cant be right because it would have to appear pretty uniform in color - it wouldnt have the "match head" effect. This looks like something illuminated, high up, leaving a contrail in the clouds.
Any possibility this is a plane illuminated by the sun? |
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| kamalktk Great Old One Joined: 05 Feb 2011 Total posts: 705 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 14-08-2013 02:58 Post subject: |
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| IamSundog wrote: | | even at a fast shutter speed a meteor in a photo would appear as a streak of light, not a bright orb followed by a contrail; |
The big meteor in Russia spends 10-12 seconds crossing the sky in the first video clip, and was a bright orb with trail.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Omh7_I8vI |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 14-08-2013 09:23 Post subject: |
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| IamSundog wrote: | | ...and a large daylight meteor would have been VERY noticeable |
...as was the one in Russia, earlier this year. But I'm not claiming the object in the photo was a large meteor - it's clearly only a very small part of the photo, and was gone in the blink of an eye.
| Quote: | | ...even at a fast shutter speed a meteor in a photo would appear as a streak of light, not a bright orb followed by a contrail |
Not so. The meteor trails you see in photos, like the recent ones of the Perseids, are taken with very low shutter speeds that stand a chance of catching a meteor, but without showing the movement of the background stars. (And very often, when a time exposure is made with the intention of showing 'star trails' as the Earth rotates, a meteor or two will be caught crossing the image.)
But a daytime image of a very distant object, taken at normal shutter speeds would not show a "bright streak". (A distant jet plane in the background of a normal photo would not appear blurred either, for the same reason: it's the angle the object moves while the shutter is open that causes blurring, but if the angle is very small this blurring will be less than the distance between the pixels in the camera's CCD.) So the absolute speed of an object does not cause significant blurring provided it is sufficiently distant to minimise its angular movement while the shutter is open.
| Quote: | | I've never seen a meteor photo or read of an observation resembling this. |
This is because the chance of capturing a daytime meteor in a random photo is incredibly small. It may have happened before, but not been noticed - jupiterbeings only noticed this anomaly when he put the image on the computer.
But nowadays most of us must have seen video of returning space debris, both by day and by night, and the images are consistent - a bright burning head, followed by a smoke-trail (which might appear bright or dark depending on the angle of illumination and the background sky.) Meteors are the same, except that we don't normally get to see the smoke-trail - Chelyabinsk was a real eye-opener for many people!
I've been studying astronomy and photography for - gulp! - sixty years now, and jupiterbeings' pic is very novel to me too, but the more I think about it (and the objections some people here have raised against the meteor hypothesis), the more I think it is a meteor. This is why I'd like a professional to look at it.
With more observations, it would be possible to calculate an orbit for this object. Nobody else may have seen it, far less photographed it, but it may have been caught on radar. The study of meteors by radar is a growing field:
| Quote: | The Daytime Craterids, a radar-detected meteor shower outburst from hyperbolic comet C/2007 W1 (Boattini)
Abstract
We report a new daytime meteor shower detected with the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR). This shower has a radiant in the southern constellation Crater. The Daytime Craterid shower was observed in 2003 and 2008 but not in any of the other years in the 2002-09 interval. The strength of this shower in the years observed is equivalent to a daily averaged zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) over 30, with a peak ZHR likely much higher at the time of the outburst.
etc...
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011MNRAS.414..668W |
So keep a full-size copy of you original pic, jupiterbeings - it could be scientifically important.  |
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| IamSundog The FTMB member previously known as Sundog
Great Old One Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Total posts: 1590 Location: Right here Gender: Male |
| Posted: 14-08-2013 23:34 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Quote: |
...even at a fast shutter speed a meteor in a photo would appear as a streak of light, not a bright orb followed by a contrail
Not so. The meteor trails you see in photos, like the recent ones of the Perseids, are taken with very low shutter speeds that stand a chance of catching a meteor, but without showing the movement of the background stars. |
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How I love a geeky quibble on the internet! Ahem....
I know that most meteor photos are time exposures. However, for the vast majority of meteors, those that are tiny and very quick, what we see is the path of incandescent air that they leave behind them. The naked eye can clearly see that this streak of light is not due just to the fast motion but that the trail persists for a fraction of a second. Even at very high shutter speeds that could freeze motion these would appear as streaks.
These small meteors burn up in the upper atmosphere, at altitudes of 70 to 100 km. The highest clouds have bases 7 km up. So if jupiterbeings' photo is of a meteor that made it down to below the base of the clouds, it must have been a real big one. A contrail would also indicate that it is a big one. If it was that large, it would have been very bright even in broad daylight - rivalling the sun - and would have lasted several seconds. I find it hard to believe that jupiterbeings wouldn't have noticed it.
The big bolides including the recent one in Russia appear as an extremely bright halo of light surrounding the rock itself, followed by a trail of incandescent air. Two views of the Russian one:
http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i395/IamSundog/Meteor1_zps524aaeb5.jpg
http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i395/IamSundog/meteor2_zpsacc02834.jpg
At the end of their run bolides usually break up into a string of fragments, and it takes a second or so before the trail of incandescent air darkens into a contrail. You can clearly see this in the Russian videos.
Maybe there's a very slim possibility that this is a daytime bolide that made it nearly to the ground, was just about to burn out, remained one object instead of breaking into fragments, and was somehow slow or cool enough that the air behind it did not glow but went straight to the contrail phase, and was somehow dim enough that jupiterbeings did not notice it through his viewfinder. But like I said, I'm pretty dubious. |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 15-08-2013 00:12 Post subject: |
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| IamSundog wrote: | So if jupiterbeings' photo is of a meteor that made it down to below the base of the clouds, it must have been a real big one. A contrail would also indicate that it is a big one. If it was that large, it would have been very bright even in broad daylight - rivalling the sun - and would have lasted several seconds. I find it hard to believe that jupiterbeings wouldn't have noticed it.
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But he didn't, and neither did anyone else, apparently, therefore your insistence that "it must have been a real big one" is incorrect.
I said from the start that I thought this was a rare photo of a daytime meteor, but the evidence is that it was not "a big one". The cloud base level is not known, so cannot be used to make assumptions about the object, as it probably was on 'its last legs' when photographed, which is why no more was heard of it. Most of it probably burned up before it penetrated the cloud base. |
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