Strange pictures of stars

dgtempe posted this in a thread here:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I thought its worth a new thread and it looked offtopic there. So here is it, let me know if there are any explanations.

I can either think of a small bug flying in front of the camera, or the guy did move the camera then put the "moving" light photo over the Actual picture of the sky in photoshop.

If you lower the brightness of the moving picture so that only the brightest showed up, as well as make the photo more transparent, and then brightened the other so that it covers any trace of the moving photo the you have that photo.

At least in theory, I haven't worked with photoshop in awhile but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be that hard to make that photo

[edit on 7-8-2007 by Tibris]

I work with photo shop daily and it would take some tweaking to make that photo like it is. Also I would like to share my own experience with UFOs and say that I have on several occasions watched a "ufo" turn itself into a "star" and completely stop moving until I got bored and left.

This photo is a classic example of what you get when you move a camera that is taking a long exposure of stars. No UFOs to see here I'm afraid...

That's all very well. But the other stars remain stationary on the image?

I'd say it was some sort of overlay. Either that, or it's three distinct lights moving simultaneously in exactly the same way, very far apart.

Overlay is far more likely.

But a very nice photo.

EDIT: Actually, now I look closer ... the paths aren't exacty the same at all ... they're similar, but different sizes.

[edit on 7-8-2007 by pk1yen]

When moved, stars which are bright enough will trail, and the ones which are not very bright, since they need more time to produce an image on the CCD will not.

Rotation of the camera would cause this... if you move it, chances are you are not going to move it without tilting it.

No overlay necessary for this effect IMO.

Welcome to the world of long exposure photography. Its no photoshop.
As posted in other thread, the object causing the trails will be invisible, just like these cars on the highway.



And these trails are not from stars because all stars should have formed trails, like this:



Its no bugs, because three bugs cannot move in a formation or something and there is no flash.

Good... then I wonder why the "true" stars in the photo don't have trails? Even with a semi long exposure you'd get a slight elongation of the stars. I'm not asking for something like on the last star photo, but maybe 10% of that or so...

Now, since there are no trails in the first photo, I would doubt the length of the exposure.
So if that truely was a thingy that flew past at that time it must have been incredibly illuminate.

On a last note... sure it could be done in photoshop.

[edit on 8/8/07 by flice]

Dang, I wish I had photo editing software here at work....up the gamma or brightness on this image. You will notice that albeit there is a brightness difference between these 2 "streaks" and their host lights they are the same, it is an artifact of some kind that has been doubled on this image either by the camera itself or from an overlay of some kind, as mentioned earlier.

Compare the upper right of center set of lights with their squiggly little lines with the lower left of center set, for practical purposes, after upping the brightness/gamma they are identical with variations in intensity between the two.

This "could" be a moving periphereal light source refracting out of shot through the lenses to cause this but without the right software I cant tell for sure.

Edit to say that there is a third "partial" repeat of the pattern in the image as well. It is the "Left" only portion of the two upper patterns and is located at the bottom center of the image and is about 50% dimmer than the upper two.

[edit on 8-8-2007 by Lost_Mind]

I agree that a poorly done job could be detected that way... but if one has discovered the few methods that there exist to blend layers seemlessly together you could actually get rid of that artifact difference.

This image I did in 5 min and though a slight tattle tale might be visible around my addition had I done it properly, say 10 more min it would be undetectable.

Not saying the image is fake... just saying it's easy to do in PS. Make up your own mind about this, I've made mine up

EDIT:

For some reason I can't post the url, so here it is manually, sry. When you get to the page please reload the page once for the image to show -.- :

Image remake



[edit on 8/8/07 by flice]

If it is long exposure like you say then even the stars that are behind the thing would have been a bit longer then normal pin pricks of light because of what you already posted about the rotation of the earth, which means Photo shop is much more likely then any giant craft floating in front of it, again it's a fairly simple process.

Also the guy on the C2C thing does not say how long he used the Exposure, If he only exposed it for a few seconds (which i believe it implies since he seemed to stay there while the photo was being taken) then the craft would still appear there, I have done a few 4-5 min exposures on my digital and the object i was taking a picture of still showed up in it after the exposure even though it was long gone (It was a ball that got hit across the screen) so I'm guessing for the object to not show up it has to be a few hours at a time. And if he did expose it for a few hours at a time, the object obviously did not move off the screen all the way (as you can see the lights did not all go off screen) so it couldn't have been moving fast enough, and should have showed up in the photo by the time it had finished exposure, since the lights finish on screen.

Also, any ideas on what the 2 blue dot star like things are?
they are very minute, and both are located between the horizontal star/ufo type lines.

are they both blue planets?
blue stars?

What are they???

It can't be *that* long an exposure - stars, as you say start to trail after a few seconds depending on how wide the lens is. This does not look more than 10-15 seconds IMO, which is still a long exposure, but not as long as is implied. It does look as if the stars are *just* starting to trail, if you look close.

The blue dots are probably hot pixels.

It doesn't change the fact that there should still be an object in the picture if it was only exposed that long, plus the lights don't move all the way off the screen so it should still be in the photo when the shutter closed.

Why does there *have* to be an object there? What makes you think that there was?

Everything about that photo points to there not being anything but stars in the frame. If there had been an object for any length of time, that was blocking out the stars, then the star density where stars were hidden by the object would be different to where the stars were not hidden by the object (if there was an object present for any length of time). The stars around any object would also be more trailed, than those only briefly exposed and then hidden. The photo does not show any of these traits - star density and length are consistent throughout the whole frame.

Is this supposed to be a case where someone actually saw an object in the field of view of the camera, and then presented this photo, or is it just a case of someone taking photos of stars, and not seeing anything "unusual" until they looked at the photos on their PC ?

To me it sounds more like that latter, and whoever took the photo is just jumping to the conclusion that they photographed a UFO that they couldn't even see in the first place. Heck, even if they did see something, it certainly doesn't look like they captured anything... except a few stars!

I thought I would check the EXIF data in the image, to see if we could learn about the camera settings used during the shot.

Unfortunatley, there was none.
This very well could have been shot with an analog camera.

I think it is a rather good picture of several, distinct objects moving around the sky. What they are, I couldn't say.

But, as always, there are the armchair image "experts" saying it's "shopped". Even those these "experts" have made some glaring mistakes in their analysis.

Honestly, you could post a genuine, actual crystal clear picture of an Alien battle cruiser, complete with a flight of escorting craft and people would still sit there and say "Hoax..it's shopped"... Why does everything have to be "shopped"?

Why not take the image for what it is, an image. Instead of trying to claim it is a shopped picture, move past that and try to explain what could cause those distinct and independent trails.

Why not read the accompanying link with the image?

Seems some people cannot even manage that...

Damajik - do you think its possible that the lights and the streaking associated with them could be from a source outside of the shot range of the camera. Almost periphereal light..

I can just imagine a somebody with a sparkler or flashlight, or even one of those stupid telescope/astronomy hating pocket LED lights bouncing around at a sharp angle to the lenses of the camera/telescope but close enough and bright enough to still refract in an odd sharp angled way through the lenses to cause this effect.

Wish they exif was there to put to rest this exposure debate. From what I see with my eyes with out the exif I might guess that the exposure was 5 - 15 secs or thereabouts, hence no exaggerated streaking of the other stars on the image, but enough to cause slight blurring and dramatic streaking of some faster moving whozit. There appears to be a little bit there but not enough to cover a very long night shot exposure.

And for the record, I dont think its "shopped"....not at this moment anyhow.

[edit on 8-8-2007 by Lost_Mind]