A Wonderful Sun Halo with double Sun Dogs today..and a pic w/something else in it?

Originally posted by factbandit
reply to post by Trublbrwing

 

It's Venus! NASA made the announcement last week that Venus can be seen with the naked eye beginning April 2, 2012. Not water spots, but Venus!

See my reply to OP for the link to the NASA announcement!

Love, Light & Peace!

Shouldn't that be ....Love, Light Up, & Peace!....

For some reason I look and am reminded of a weather ballon

What a great picture! If that's Nibiru I better get my lousy butt to the coin shop and buy some gold for an offering.

reply to post by westcoast


Shadow's all wrong.

It could be something and that's all that matters.
Why are we not shooting first and asking questions later?

its a... WATER DROPLET

Damn... now we're just going nuts. When did ppl abandon realistic critical thinking?

Wow...

i am in Vancouver Canada now and saw your sun dog today too...

Honestly, this doesn't look like a man-made thing....hmmm, maybe Nibiru or possible a UFO/space junk?

reply to post by JROCK2527


There is a NASA balloon base north west from where I live... I was thinking that it could possibly be a balloon also but I have seen one in the same proximity to the sun as in the OP's picture.... A balloon would appear to be glowing and be more like the sun in color.... I'm going to try and see if I can view it through a 13 power rifle scope... That is the only optics I have except for my eye glasses.

reply to post by westcoast


Wow awesome find!!

It's a really cool picture - creepy... but cool

I don't really have any logical explanations that explain this entirely.... strange indeed!

Ciao and much love

Wow....I never expected this kind of a response. Sorry I didn't get back here sooner, my picture threads aren't usually that active. As a few others have pointed out (thank you, btw) I am not new here to ATS. If you check out my profile you'll see that I have posted dozens of pictures here over the years. My main intent was to share the phenomenon of the double sun dogs with the added extra fun of 'name that smudge'.

Since there IS so much interest in it, I'll give you some more info and some other pics for comparison.

I took these from my backyard yesterday in the afternoon (around four). I was standing (although for sun halos I usually have to lay down. I didn't have to for this one). It was finally a nice, sunny day without any rain or moisture. I used my good 'ole Nikon D40, and I DID have a filter on it (screw on cap kind). I cleaned both my lense and the filter prior to taking the pictures. I did a no-no with a digital camera and took a picture of the sun. (it can burn out pixels) In order to do this, I auto-focused it and then switched it to manual to snap the pic. I was looking to the SW, so the 'object' is to the NE of the sun.

I did NOT see anything there when I took the picture. I took several more pictures afterwards, but this was the first of them (for the day). Unfortunately, even though I recently cleaned out my lense, I discovered I have some new dust bunnies in there. I went ahead and circled them for you on the original picture. As you can see, they are nothing like the other spot in question.

I am not a 'professional' photographer...but it is a big hobby of mine and I've taken thousands upon thousands of images of the past few years. I've seen some questionable things before, but just brush it off to something on the lense. This is probably the most interesting, just becuase of the shape and dimension to it.

I have gone over the other pictures taken yesterday very closely and while I found a few buds, birds and unrecognizable spots...nothing even close to spot in question.

I am quite certain it isn't: an orb, dust on my lense, lense flare, water drop, venus or nirubu (did i spell that right?), a booger or photoshop

What I think it could be: something in between my outer lense and the filter, a bug very close in flight

Other unlikely possibilities: something high up in the atmosphere moving very fast (wouldn't it be blurred though?) wierd digital 'noise'

Personally, I'm still going with the death star.


Here is the first pic with the dust bunnies circled:




Here is the second picture I took....probably about 10 seconds later. Same properties, etc. As you can see...nothing there. I didn't even lower my camera in between them...if it were a planet or something moving slowly, it would still be there. I also think that if it were something on the lense, there would be something there. Maybe it wouldn't look quite the same, but there would be something there.



I took this next one a few minutes later from a different location (across the street from my house). Zooming in, I can find a few birds or maybe bugs...but nothing similar.





So there you have it. Hope you enjoy the pictures, irregardless of the mystery spot.

Ugh....okay. One more post and then I have to go to bed.

I got to thinking about if it were actually something moving in the sky vs. a bug or a spot on my lense, than it would make sense that it should be in one of the other pictures. I spent some more time looking closer at the other pictures and may have found it again. SO. Here is another one of the pictures taken a few minutes later across the street. ETA : (I take that back...I was still in my yard. It was two minutes after the first picture)


The original:



It is hard to even see anything without zooming in, but if you look closely....first, to the left you can see what appears to be either a bug in close or maybe even a bird. Hard to tell, but there is something there but not what I would call anything interesting. Now off to the right, on the top half of the picture is another circular something but quite a bit smaller than in the first picture.

Here is the same picture with the contrast tweaked so you can see it better:




Now, here it is cropped up-close:




Again, I am not claiming this to be anything in particular, but I do find it a little bit odd. I'm sure we'll never know....but maybe I'll look a bit more closely at my pictures from now on.

reply to post by FireballStorm


Very cool. Great answer.
thanks for your reply.

I've also caught an orb on camera


It' a shape shifter

reply to post by DenyObfuscation


it means i took the original picture...doubled the DPI, created a High Pass overlay (to sharpen image)
messed around with brightness & contrast (overexposing and re-balancing)
Then i cropped it and made an animation from original and my edited/enhanced image.

then posted it to ATS...






as you can see the object makes a shadow against the clouds (left side of sphere) thus NOT a planet

No pixels where harmed during the making of this animation.

Don't really know what to say... At first sight I was into the water droplet hypothesis, but after some tweaks on Photoshop I'm really confused, because it looks like a solid object reflecting the Sun light in the right direction:



Judging by the whole image I assume the lens of OP's camera was pretty much clean when he took the photo. And based in the time the OP posted the thread and the location on his avatar info, I also did check Stellarium for an approximate comparison and there's nothing visible next to the Sun, that could explain that sphere.

As a photographer I really don't think this is a water droplet. Water on the lens just distorts the image on the other end, it doesnt make circular shapes like that.

It is also NOT a dust spec or anything as those show up the size of a few pixels.

Cool pic though! Love those sun dogs and halos.

reply to post by blahblah454


As a photographer you should know than, that it doesnt always just distort or blur that part of the image, depending on the size, volume of the drop. And it can take all sorts of shapes.
But it depends more on your camera settings, diafragma, focus, focal length and even exposure time.
what do you make of my previous post?
two different images, the last one is a crop of the first.

reply to post by intergalactic fire


Well I'm really interested in those pictures you posted. You are right that it's pretty similar. I'm guessing yours is possibly a water drop or something else on the lense. The main difference that I see between them is the blur factor. I guess that is what is throwing me off on the one in my image...it just doesn't have that blurred affect you usually get with it. That doesn't mean it isn't a water drop though...perhaps the lighting made it appear sharper, or the fact that I had it on manual. I think your theory is the most likely.

As a photographer, I hope you enjoy the sun halo picture!

Could just be a lens anomaly. When you point your camera at extremely bright objects and let all that light in you will see imperfections in the glass or maybe something else like a chip that you would not otherwise see. Same reason you get lens flares and rods that are actually flying bugs.