[meteorite-list] Mystery object in photo

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Dec 8 23:00:57 2004
Message-ID: <41B7C4BF.F13994FB_at_bhil.com>

Hi, Chris and everybody...

    Like you, I was horrified/disgusted at having to use JPEG's that were
practically one gigantic artifact. I would love to have the RAW data, but I
wouldn't be surprised to find it was gone by now. Usually, the conversion to an
image format takes place when downloading the RAW data from camera memory to a
computer, mediated by the capture software. If it's not still in the camera (or
its memory card), it's gone.
    The creator of the first difference image later posted another diff image
which shows the surface of the inlet between the pier and the camera and the
brightening is general over the entire inlet and brightest on a central line
from the camera to the flash. Here's the URL:
<http://images.isja.org/images/strange_diff_pryde_03.png>
    I don't think it's significant whether the streak enters the frame or starts
within it. The other characteristic you mention, the slight widening to the
left, could be considered another indication of a dissipating trail from the
object and hence proof it's real. But the image is not really good enough for
that.
    I judged a slight arc by enlarging the image to various degrees and putting
a flexible lucite scale on the face of my flat-screen! But the optics of digital
cameras are rife with spherical abberations of perspective, and this is a Cannon
G3, a cheap point and shoot.
    The camera (for those who asked) was set on automatic; the photographer did
not stand by the camera and make exposures. The frames are 15 seconds apart. All
digital images contain a set of embedded data about the camera state and
setting, time, and so forth. These can be faked but it's not that easy.
    As for whether the image is a fake, the best argument against it is this:
why would you fake an image about which no one can agree? Why make it look like
it hit a lamp post when you know the post won't show any damage? Why not just
photoshop in a BRIGHT streak, like everyone expects to see? It's easy; I could
take this picture and produce a lovely little fake in about an hour, complete
with fake embedded data. But it would ultimately be detectable.
    Now, why a low density object? Actually, it's easy to transport
extra-terrestial material with cosmic velocities gently to the surface of the
Earth without damage. Every year, tens of thousands of tons of cosmic particles
drift down through the atmosphere, taking weeks to days to do so, and plop onto
the planet. But they're tiny: dust. Equally, big nasty chunks try it, and they
are fried for trying. At some point, the dual axes of these graphs cross and the
entering survivors live there.
    The low angle of entry, complained about by many, is in fact one of the most
salient characteristics of a body that can survive to reach the surface of the
Earth. A grazing path slows the buildup of entry forces. Low density? As the
density decreases, the ratio of surface area to mass increases, until at some
point you have an object that can dissipate the heat of its entry sufficiently
to be non-luminous, like the "mystery" object.
    The suicidal path for a small meteorite is to bore straight into the
atmosphere from the zenith at high velocity. "Hell, it's only 30,000 meters; I
can make it in less than a second!" Poof!
    Additionally, a flattened shape would probably aid survival as well, but I'm
a physicist, so all my objects are generalized to spheres. :-)
    As for bugs... I didn't know it when I started reading all those pages of
argument, but there is a (pseudo) controversy about photographing insects; just
go Google "flying rods." If you photograph insects at slow shutter speeds, they
appear as strange alien forms with helical fins, and yes, there are some idiots
out there peddling bug videos as movies of tiny alien spacecraft invisible to
the naked eye, blah, blah...
    But the streak in the mystery photo (exposure 1/20 second), proposed to be a
time-blurred bug, does not look anything like what an actual long exposure image
of a flying insect looks like. Check out the "flying rods" and marvel at the
gullibility of the poor humans.
    I still don't know what this is.


Sterling K. Webb
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Chris Peterson wrote:

> Hi Sterling-
>
> While I appreciate your efforts at approaching this in a scholarly way, and
> agree completely that there is an awful lot of wasted bandwidth on the
> discussion list endorsed by APOD, your view an mine are quite different, and
> point to the difficulties of interpreting very subtle effect in images-
> especially JPEG images.
>
> In particular, I disagree with the following physical observations:
>
> -That there is a correlated brightness increase in the inlet. I see only a
> variation caused by the surface chop changing the sky reflection. There are
> various areas of each image that shift slightly in brightness, sometimes
> more, sometimes less.
>
> -Your assessment of the difference image. The difference image I made shows
> the streak extending off the left edge of the image, not stopping. It also
> shows an un-arced path that varies in width over its length and is slightly
> wider overall at the left edge, tapering toward the right. Again, these are
> subtle effects, and working with JPEG images is pushing everything towards
> the noise limits.
>
> I remain convinced this is not a physical object moving at high speed. There
> is simply no mechanism for any thing meteoric- regardless of density- to
> make it to the surface with supersonic or hypersonic speed and not have been
> generating a lot of very obvious activity in the seconds before that. The
> idea that we are seeing something right in front of the lens is much
> simpler, can explain all of the features of the image, and doesn't have any
> image features that strongly argue against it. Indeed, many of the
> interpretation details- the actual length of the streak, the curvature of
> the streak, the uniformity of the streak, are largely irrelevant to the bug
> theory, but not to any high-speed object theory.
>
> It will be interesting to see what comes of this (if anything). Of course,
> if those little white pixels on the image really are faces turning towards
> something, and these witnesses turn up with a story, that will be very
> interesting. Until then, there is nothing but three noisy images to work
> with, and I'll stick with the simplest explanation.
>
> Chris
>
> *****************************************
> Chris L Peterson
> Cloudbait Observatory
> http://www.cloudbait.com
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sterling K. Webb" <kelly_at_bhil.com>
> To: "Meteorite Mailing List" <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 3:22 AM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Mystery object in photo
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > At the moment I start to write this, there are 37 PAGES on the
> "official"
> > discussion site for the mystery photo, and I've read ALL of them. A great
> deal
> > of it is waste because most posters are not reading the other posts and
> seem
> > to be unaware of the basic facts of the physical situation. Many theories
> are
> > being batted about, mostly uselessly:
> >
> > Film, lens and shutter defects: It wasn't a film camera; it was a
> digital
> > camera. It does not have the characteristics of a CCD defect. It does not
> seem
> > to be a fake.
> >
> > The streak is the shadow of a jet contrail: Since we know the
> geographic
> > location and the precise time (encoded in the camera data), we can tell
> that
> > the photo was taken at or just seconds after the setting of the sun, so
> ANY
> > aerial shadow is a physical impossibility. A depressing number of
> > "contrailists" are professional scientists. Strange phenomena, go away!
> Sigh.
> > To orient yourself, the camera is facing slightly east of due south.
> The
> > illumination of the clouds is from the sun below the horizon (the sun is
> off
> > to the right in the photo). The illumination on the water's surface is
> > reflected "cloudglow."
> >
> > Exploding light bulb: The local utility has inspected the light pole
> and
> > lamp housing and found NO PHYSICAL DAMAGE of any kind. While the light
> bulb
> > was found to be non-operable (burned out), everything was physically
> intact,
> > no leaked sodium vapor, dents, dings, scratches, broken glass, etc.
> > Additionally, it is a sodium vapor light bulb, which would go bad by
> cycling
> > off and on, NOT by a terminal flash like an incandescent bulb. Another
> popular
> > but useless theory.
> >
> > Ball lightning: Please! Contact Nikola Tesla right away...
> >
> > Folks hereabouts on the List seem to like the "Bug" theory. Too bad.
> There
> > are lots of reasons why the bug theory is wrong, but here's the most
> concise
> > one. In the frame that shows the "terminal flash" (which, in the bug
> theory,
> > is the bug itself only inches away from the camera and caught by the
> camera
> > flash unit), when compared with the before and after frames, the waters of
> the
> > inlet between the pier and the camera brighten very noticeably, as if
> > reflecting the "flash" from the pier, and the near sides of the adjacent
> light
> > posts brighten to a lesser degree also. The flash is a real source of
> > illumination and is located in the vicinity of the pier. No bugs.
> >
> > Anyone who has puzzled over the mystery photo should look at:
> > <http://images.isja.org/images/strange_diff_pryde_01.png>
> > This is a "difference" processing, created by subtracting 50% of the
> > "before" frame and 50% of the "after" frame, thus isolating only those
> > features unique to the "impact" frame. It clearly shows:
> > a) the streak in the frame has a definite starting point within the
> frame,
> >
> > b) the streak extends to the "flash" and not beyond it,
> > c) the streak is quite uniform in thickness and density, with no taper
> nor
> > spread and a sharp commencement in the photo,
> > d) the streak has a very slight downward arc, i.e., is responding to
> the
> > force of gravity,
> > e) nothing in the photo connects the lamp post with the flash; they
> are
> > merely adjacent. The streak passes in front of the lamp post. (If
> something
> > had hit the lamp post or light housing, they would have moved or wobbled
> > slightly and hence shown up in the difference analysis, like the leaves on
> the
> > trees in the left of the difference photo do.)
> > f) further along the track of the "object," in front of the flash is a
>
> > compact circular shock wavefront from disruption of the "object" and a
> > co-centered sideways-viewed disc of ejecta.
> >
> > So, we have a physical "object," it was in the frame of view when the
> > exposure started, it's showing up in the photo as dark because it is
> blocking
> > sunlight reflected off the clouds from reaching the imaging element of the
> > camera. The streak is not emitting light, in other words. It could be a
> shock
> > tube of water vapor or even smoke particles, but it's not luminous. It is
> > actually faint, blocking only about 5% of the sunlight. There is no way to
> > tell the duration of the event, except to say that it could not have
> exceeding
> > the exposure time (1/20 second).
> >
> > Only one individual in these hundreds of posts attempted to scale the
> > event and determine the sizes and physical parameters of things, which was
> > what I was doing, too. A nice comparison. We both chose independently to
> base
> > our scale on the size of the car parked near the pier. He assumed it was
> an
> > American-sized car; I assumed it was a smaller Australian-sized car. So
> our
> > estimates differed by that factor.
> > I think the streak is about 2 meters across and 160 meters long; he
> thinks
> > 205 meters long, and so forth. I make the velocity of the streaking
> "object"
> > ~2700 meters per second (Mach 8). This velocity calculation is an average
> > speed and assumes the streak moves for the full 1/20 second; it could be
> > faster; it could be slowing down from a greater velocity. It obviously
> halts
> > at the flash.
> > The flash itself is about 3 meters across with a bright inner core
> about
> > 1-1/2 meter across. This bright core, by the way, is brighter in absolute
> > luminosity in this photo than the bright spot in the cloud deck that
> directly
> > reflects the sun. VERY bright.
> >
> > Many posts on the List discussed entry angles, vertical or not. Let me
> > just point out that vertical drop only happens after velocity stagnation,
> and
> > this baby is MOVING! So, angle does not tell us much one way or another.
> > As to whether or not an object could penetrate the atmosphere with
> this
> > residual velocity but without heating to luminescence... Certainly no
> stone
> > nor iron, small or large, could do so.
> > The critical parameter is density. A cometary ice particle, fairly
> small,
> > with a very low density, can penetrate the atmosphere nearly to the
> surface
> > without excessive heating or braking. Think densities of less than 0.01
> gram
> > per cubic centimeter.
> > The argument against this, of course, is that it is a special case and
> > hence less probable. But possible. Cometary particles with densities this
> low
> > have been observed, although those observed have been smaller particles
> than
> > this one would have to have been.
> > For those who like to calculate the fall of incoming objects, try an
> > object that ends up as a 3 centimeter ball weighing about 100 milligrams
> at
> > disruption. Try starting with 10 cm. and 1 gm, or with 30 cm and 10 gm.
> >
> > There are other indications that this was a physically real event.
> There
> > are two people sitting on benches on the pier. In the "before" frame, they
> > seem to be turned away from where the flash will be. But in the "after"
> frame,
> > they are facing the flash point. Something got their attention.
> >
> > Ignoring the really weird theories (tiny UFO's, particle beam weapons,
> > dark lasers, the CIA, black helicopters, etc.) in the "official"
> discussion,
> > one popular theory is that this was the launch of a firework or model
> rocket.
> > PLEASE, if there are any model rocketeers out there who can build a
> rocket
> > of any kind that can accelerate from a standstill to 5400 meters per
> second in
> > 1/20 of a second, CALL NASA RIGHT AWAY! We need you.
> >
> > It's not a conventional meteorite (a stray NWA). It does appear to me
> to
> > have been something physically "real." You got my two cents worth in the
> > "cometary ice particle" bit. But the "mystery" seems to still be a
> mystery.
> >
> > Oh, and they're up to 43 PAGES of "discussion" now.
> >
> >
> > Sterling K. Webb
Received on Wed 08 Dec 2004 10:21:35 PM PST