Strange light over Melbourne 23/8/11

Those are definitely some great pics!!

But I do have to say it looks like a balloon with tethers.. seems to be "swinging" since in each shot the tether is another position.

Dont give up though!

I thought I would also post this wide view to give some perspective. The light is just below dead centre, you will have to zoom in a bit. Right click and select view immage then zoom with your browser. This is a crop of the larger file.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/605355a74cba.jpg[/atsimg]

The origional is here to download with exif as always:



Man, that zoom is something! lol

reply to post by Shamatt


I am having trouble downloading your original size photographs. Every attempt is meet with the following message:

The owner of this photo has requested to keep this photo private

The "Large" size image will download but the file size is 30 times smaller than the original file size. If you prefer to not release the originals, perhaps you can release a crop without resampling of the object only?

Also, can you explain why a high ISO setting (i.e. 800) was paired with a very fast shutter speed (i.e. 1/4000 sec)? Perhaps my experience and equipment are dated but I always try to use the lowest ISO possible to avoid digital noise artifacts. Specifically, I often shoot hand-held using a non-stabilized 300 mm lens, ISO 200, F/5.6, and for daytime scenes any shutter speed faster that 1/300 sec hides any hand-shake.

Best regards,
Z

Originally posted by DrZrD
reply to post by Shamatt

 

I am having trouble downloading your original size photographs. Every attempt is meet with the following message:

The owner of this photo has requested to keep this photo private

The "Large" size image will download but the file size is 30 times smaller than the original file size. If you prefer to not release the originals, perhaps you can release a crop without resampling of the object only?

Also, can you explain why a high ISO setting (i.e. 800) was paired with a very fast shutter speed (i.e. 1/4000 sec)? Perhaps my experience and equipment are dated but I always try to use the lowest ISO possible to avoid digital noise artifacts. Specifically, I often shoot hand-held using a non-stabilized 300 mm lens, ISO 200, F/5.6, and for daytime scenes any shutter speed faster that 1/300 sec hides any hand-shake.

Best regards,
Z

Hi

Sorry about the photo download - I have set permissions to public, but I didn't realise that by default there was a seperate entry in your site profile to select for download of originals. I have now changed this so you can try again.

The odd camera setup is because I only got this camera yesterday. The A580 has a lot going on and I was in a bit of a flap as you can immagine. Any way - I had manually set ISO800 the night before for indoore testing the in body anti-shake. I forgot to put it back to Auto. If I were thinking better this morning I would have selcted ISO 100. Any way - I shot in Aperture priority and manually selected F6 to F8 to bracket exposure. Also I have read that F7 is this lenses sharpest setting so I also had that in mind. Hence the high shutter speed - the camer thought I was over exposing and selected the fastest possible shutter speed, which is 1/4000

A rule of thumb, as you obviously know, is that the shutter speed should be equal or faster than the zoom in mm for not seeing shake. So in your examle 300mm zoom at 1/300 is in that - although I will admit I would struggle with this - you are a steadier hand than I am if you can pull that off lol. I rely on the anti-shake technology (My last camera was the Konica Minolta 5D, which is an ancestor of the Sony)

There are many more of these pictures. About 40 in all - I will post up a zip file with all of them if anyone is interested in that? Many of them were similer as I was shooting at 5 FPS for 3 to 5 shots at a time.

I was thinking.

Finally, someone with a decent camera setup and the know-how (almost lol) to use it captures a strange light in the sky, and it turns out it's probably a weather baloon. This means 1 of two things:

If more people had better cameras we would have a lot more photos of weather balloons, and a lot lesss dodgy pics to wade through,

OR

If more people had better cameras we would have a lot of decent close up detaild UFO pictures.

Makes you think

I am now much less convinced that this was a weather baloon. Why? Because I just saw another one. I rushed in to grab the camera, rushed out and focussed on it just as it made a high sppeed exit to the South West. Literally went from stationary to zooming accross the sky and out of view in a split seccond. Hence no pictures today!

It was EXACTLY the same to the naked eye as the one previously reported in this thread.

Interesting!