Moon Anomaly...Satellite Mabey??

It's called a "hot pixel" or a "dead pixel".

As the above poster says, repeat the exposure with your lens cap on, and it should stand out a bit more.

As ArMaP said, it is most likely a pixel malfunction.. which is not good news for you i fear.. sorry.

I mapped the "blue dot" on this animation with the two images. you can see that since you did not use a tripod, the dot only appears to be moving when in fact it is not.

image source: http://www.danmensinger.com/stuff/moon.gif

I've just spent half an hour checking my camera (using the posters method) and the camera seems fine. Trust me, its only six months old and if there was anything wrong with it then i would have it back to the shop without haste. I'm willing to accept that though, if some of you feel its a dead pixel, then ok.

Mate, take a photo of a plain black background. If the pixel is dead, ill come out white.

Also, to the person who said this is "obviously" a fake because the artifact is in colour when the rest is black and white:

The picture was taken in colour, thus meaning that if it isnt a dead pixel, then the artifact is the colour it turned out to be in the picture. The rest is black and white because guess what... the moon is white and space is black.

Ok, i've a little research and i'm definitely opting for the dead pixel theory but i've tested my camera and there is no sign of it effecting my camera now. Do you think this is something that can just happen without effecting your camera long term?

lol, so much for your hoax theory's. I'm thinking these forums are plagued with paranoia.

Thanks for all the positive advise.

reply to post by WayAboveTopSecret

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Get good at using the "clone tool" in you image editing software. Hot pixels are quickly and easily removed. All sensors get them eventually - they are caused by cosmic rays striking the photo-detectors, so more will appear over time. All my DSLRs have them! It's just something we photographers have to live with...

reply to post by WayAboveTopSecret

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Once they are there, they won't go away. Your settings may affect how visible they are, so if you're not seeing the hot/dead pixel now, try using other setting(longer exposure and higher iso will probably do it). I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs, but dead and hot pixes have different causes, and the effect you see will be different depending on which you have and/or the settings you choose. For me it doesn't really matter, since you can't do much about them. I just remove them wherever they are objectionable.

WayAboveTopSecret...

Please check your u2u's


[edit on 21-3-2008 by Jbird]

Well, I tried to temper my opinion a bit. I didn't want to say it was definitely a hoax. I just said I *thought* it was fake because of the color differences. I probably should have phrased it differently, but there was no way to be sure in couple of minutes I looked at it. I should have spent more time on it and given a better, more complete answer.

As a pro photographer who has taken many shots of the moon using a 70-300mm lense I will say this: The photographs, in my opinion, have not been doctored that I can see. The idea of a missing pixel in the cmoss sensor of the camera isnt possible due to the fact that like a spec of dust on the sensor, all that happens is that you get a grey smokey spot on the photograph. My own theory is based on it being a satelite orbiting, not the moon, but the earth, hense the diffirence in detail expressed almost as a diffrent white balance selection. Photographs will always be tested and doubted, remember this .

Also as a follow up to my last posting, Nikon, Canon dslr cameras can NOT get a dead pixel in the cmoss sensor that shows up as a bright spot, they are not tft monitors, they read light . They dont make light !! Also the idea of taking a photograph of a black background makes no sense. Can I suggest you do the following: set the fstop to f22, exposure to +5 seconds, and on manual focus. Put your camera on a tripod and aim it at a light source, tungsten house light, anything. press the shutter then examine the photograph. If you have a faulty sensor you will see a black spot, where no light has been gathered by the particular area of the sensor. In all my years using dslr cameras I have never known a sensor to fail in this way and if there was a minute receiver error the sensor would just not work, culminating in a camera error code and the camera unable to take any shots. Hope this is helpfull

If you are a photographer then I suppose you never had a dead or "hot" pixel problem.

As the CCD sensor is the equivalent to the film on a conventional camera, a dead or "hot" pixel can be seen as the same as a spot on the film that has no emulsion, making it "immune" to the image being captured.

Edit: I see from your second post that you probably do not understand what is being said about "hot" pixels on the sensor, so I will try to explain it better, as soon as I can make my cat to shut up and go to sleep.

[edit on 21/3/2008 by ArMaP]

For starters, a *real* pro would never use a 70-300mm lens to photograph the moon

Secondly it's not lense it's lens.



Tell that to my Canon and Nikon DSLR's please.

reply to this post and this post by captiva

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OK, now that my cat is sleeping, I will try to explain.

In a digital camera, the sensor replaces the film, both in its function and its place inside the camera (that makes it easier to adapt existing camera designs to the new technology).

Unlike film, digital camera sensors are made up by a grid of pixels (pixel means "picture element", so it can also be applied to light-receiving pixels) that after some processing are stored in the camera memory or in a memory card (or sometimes directly sent to a computer or other device) in a computer-readable format.

The most common sensors are CCDs (charge-coupled devices) and CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor).

CCDs (and in this case the Nikon D80 has a CCD sensor) work by transforming light in an electrical charge that is read by a second element that does not receive the light but that is coupled with the light-sensitive element by it's charge, reproducing it and making a "copy" of the image that is formed by the lens over the light-sensitive elements of the CCD on the electronically-readable side.

This (analog, i.e. directly dependent on the strength of the light and with infinite possible values between minimum and maximum of its capacity) charge is then converted to a digital representation that can be easily processed.

Each pixel in the final image is usually made up of four sensor pixels, the most common arrangement being a Bayer filter over the sensor.

If, for any reason, one of the elements of the sensor has a bigger or smaller rate of charge it will show a different value of charge after the time it took to take the photo, making it more visible on longer exposures.

This "hot" pixel problem is so real that some manufacturers have developed methods of creating a "hot" pixel map to compensate the effect on the final image.