About your comment on Ice Particles or Urine, etc. It could well be, and in my mind they are still valid theories. What would really help in asking these questions would be if we knew where the camera is on the shuttle (inside or outside, facing fore, aft?) and if we could essemble some sort of image depicting the location of the shuttle, the location of the tether, and the location of the Earth, with distances marked.

Unfortunately, Balez and I can't seem to find this data from NASA, and it should damned well be there somewhere, right?

Originally posted by nablator
You are mixing up two different things. You don't see Airy disks when you are out of focus. Is there a series of concentric rings around the disks? No. What we are seeing is focal blur, perfectly explained by geometric optics. It produces an area of confusion with sharp boundaries, the same shape as the aperture. As you can see from the images that you posted yourself, the boundary of an Airy disks is completely different.
Before you lecture people on how light bends around objects try to educate yourself a bit, and understand why the result of your 2 experiences have nothing to do with diffraction.
Read this for example: focus and Airy disk.

Note how most of the lines in the fabric are still resolved at f/11, but they are shown with slightly lower small-scale contrast or acutance (particularly where the fabric lines are very close). This is because the airy disks are only partially overlapping, similar to the effect on adjacent rows of alternating black and white airy disks (as shown on the right). By f/22, almost all fine lines have been smoothed out because the airy disks are larger than this detail.

Physics for scientists and engineers, 3rd edition, Giancoli. pg. 896
Two principal factors limit the resolution of a lens. The first is lens aberrations. ...
Careful design of compound lenses can reduce aberrations significantly, but they cannot be eliminated entirely. The second factor that limits resolution is diffraction, which cannot be corrected for because it is a natural result of the wave nature of light

True, if out of focus, the rays of light will not converge on the screen, thus making a blurry image. However note that being out of focus does not make an image appear larger, ever. The aperture size does.

An out of focus point will be a blurry point, not a disk. The disk is the sole effect of diffraction.

Reflecting telescopes show the shadow of the secondary obstruction when out of focus. In this example, the shadow is from a CCD camera mounted at the front of a Celestron C8 tube. The line at bottom is the cord to the camera.

Originally posted by waveguide3

Originally posted by Balez
Still, as i said earlier, the complete specs of the camera would be usefull, first so we can say for certain what close camera objects will look like, or what happens with objects far away with infinity zoom or view.
We can argue the points of this for a long time... Unless we have some hardware to work with, it will only be theories and asumptions not a solution to this.

There's a lot of camera data given in the following video discussion. MoronAntidote seems to have intimate knowledge of NASA's systems and puts up some strong arguments for a mundane explanation.
Camera artefacts of the type found in the STS-75 tether footage

Expand the 'About this Video' section for camera references.

WG3

But still it does not explain why certain objects go in different directions,

or why some certain objects do not seem to be affected.

If these things are close objects to the camera, space radiation would not explain their movements, since the shuttle is travelling at least at 17000mph.

Radiation pression from plain sunlight is weak, but the downward acceleration seems pretty weak too.

Good thinking! I extracted a few frames at 3 min 40 s from the 06 min 27 s YouTube video with VLC player. The floater is moving horizontally at this point, while the jittering is vertical.