Please help identify this streak of light in the sky

reply to post by woogleuk


I think posting the original unedited photo, with the photo before and after that, would answer a lot of questions.

Originally posted by Thunda
reply to post by FireballStorm

 

Would a cosmic ray be in the visible spectrum of light? It would explain the extremely short duration (Which rules out 'contrails!!!!).

If I'm not mistaken, cosmic rays are outside the visible spectrum, at the smaller wavelength end of the spectrum, and therefore much more energetic than visible wavelengths.

So when they hit an atom (which doesn't necessarily have to be part of the sensor), a shower of less energetic particles is produced, some of which can be photons in the visible spectrum, which may in turn hit the sensor.

A direct hit on the sensor from a cosmic ray, even though not in the visible range can also produce an imaging artifact though, since a sensor pixel/pixels are effectively turned on when they are "charged".

A cosmic ray can charge a pixel/pixels in the same way that photons hitting the sensor register as light. The charged state of the sensor pixel is how a digital sensor registers which pixels have had photons hitting them, and when a camera reads which pixels are charged, and which are not, it uses this information to build up an image that we can see.

Here's another explanation of how CCD sensors work, that you might find a bit easier to understand.