Picture of strange black dot in the sky

Today at lunch I was looking over a picture I took about a week ago and noticed a strange thing in the sky and zoomed in to what looks like a black dot, never seen anything like this before - has anyone else seen stuff like this?

pic 1

zoom full

a reply to: circuitsports

Dirt on the lens maybe. It looks almost like a small water drop with a piece of dirt in the middle. I don't think it is in the sky but I am no expert.

Thanks for sharing the images

Yeah...I've seen birds, drones before and as an amateur photographer, I know that dirt on a lens can cause artifacts. Do You? This might help:

JPEG artifacts, low-light noise and even dust can affect everything from DSLRs to camera phones. Here's how to spot and avoid problems where possible.

www.tested.com...

a reply to: shawmanfromny

I take alot of sky photography with my pixel 3 and I've seen lense, flare light ghosting, random stuff like that, enough times - I have never seen a black dot in the sky like that - the image I posted has a slight filter so I went back and looked at the original and it's there too - something is physically there, in the middle of that cloud, which I do remember seeing, I just didn't see the dot until I looked at the picture I took.

originally posted by: circuitsports
a reply to: shawmanfromny

I take alot of sky photography with my pixel 3 and I've seen lense, flare light ghosting, random stuff like that, enough times - I have never seen a black dot in the sky like that - the image I posted has a slight filter so I went back and looked at the original and it's there too

I downloaded the image you posted and maybe the site you posted it at changed the image, but there's no black dot like you're posting. This is what I downloaded from the site you posted your image at, cropped to the "black dot" object, which is really more like a white blurred something, and no pixels are black.



Maybe there is a black dot in your original image, but if so, and if you want us to see it, you will need to find a way to post the original image such that it is preserved without distortion, including the black dot.

a reply to: circuitsports

given the level of image processing in that file - any attempts to analyse your alledged " black dot " = pointless

Having studied the "dot" I believe I can now identify it as one of these:

This is the original - zooming in to 500% it's still there

i.postimg.cc...

a reply to: circuitsports
That's a lot better resolution, but still no black pixels though.
One possibility could be lens flare, from one of those lights or a reflection of one of those lights. They have a dark something within the light which could be the source of the dark spot. Here's a closeup of one of the lights showing the dark thing in the light which is off-center, and and the light is not quite round:



One way to see if it's lens flare is to find the geometric center of the image and look for a light source equidistant from the center on the opposite side of the center. The red X marks the geometric center and there is what seems like a very bright light or reflection not quite equidistant but if the geometric center of the lens isn't exactly aligned with the geometric center of the image, there could be a slight difference in the distance. The blue arrows point toward the object you're asking about, and a possible light source, which I can't tell for sure but looks like it might be one of the lights reflecting off a car which could distort it and change the shape a little, of the light and the dark spot:



It's possible there's a dark spot in the light reflection the lower left blue arrow is pointing to but we can't see it because it's overexposed, however the reflection could reduce the intensity enough to reveal the dark spot. The general not quite round shape of the possible lens flare isn't that far off of the possible source of the reflection. Here's what the pixels of the object of interest look like from your latest post of the full image.



If I check the "enhance" option on my image viewer to smooth out the pixellation on the object of interest (top) and compare that to the possible reflection source (bottom, flipped for comparison of the possible reflection), they both have a not quite round shape:



I'm not sure it's lens flare in this case, but it does happen. I made a thread about such lens flare in the Washington DC UFO photo and I'm 100% sure those lights in the sky are lens flares, and there are some other examples of lens flares in that thread where you can see the reflected image is sometimes distorted from the original light source.

Lens Flare Thread


Those lines don't go through the geometric center of the image because that's a cropped image, and note when the lights are overexposed you can't tell the difference in brightness, which is probably why some the brighter lights show a reflection, while others don't. Some reflections are obscured by other features in the photo.

There seem to be a number of these starfish UFOs flying around these days. There was one spotted in Tuscon abut a year ago, and the ISS caught one on the background in November.

Who can say?

a reply to: Arbitrageur

might be a lens flare - I have something I have been looking at for a couple weeks trying to figure out what it was and I have video though - hopefully you can take a crack at that

For anyone wanting a really closeup shot

postimg.cc...

a reply to: Arbitrageur

might be a lens flare - I have something I have been looking at for a couple weeks trying to figure out what it was and I have video though - hopefully you can take a crack at that

For anyone wanting a really closeup shot

postimg.cc...

a reply to: Arbitrageur

might be a lens flare - I have something I have been looking at for a couple weeks trying to figure out what it was and I have video though - hopefully you can take a crack at that

For anyone wanting a really closeup shot

postimg.cc...

a reply to: circuitsports
That closeup shot shows two more lights, underneath and to the left, but much fainter, did you notice those? I missed them before because they are faint and I was zooming in on the "dark dot" object. I think those additional two lights remove any doubt that it's lens flare, at least for me. The symmetry is perfect for all three reflections. Maybe you can see the three lights circled in red and their three reflections circled in yellow here:



So that dark dot is whatever that dark object is seen in the original light, distorted from being reflected at least once inside the lens and probably more times than that if it's reflected off a car as it appears.