Strange streak discussion: 2004 Dec 7 APOD

[mikedoug]

Thanks, I always liked "bitter sowl" far better than the average lager.

[Luis]

I see... if I understand you correctly what you are trying to do is to measure the "strightness" of the pattern. By doing the LSF to that template you want to measure variations from it.

Now wouldn't this analysis be insensitive to what side of the streak is changing shape? I mean it would equally pick up a symmetric narrowing of the streak and an asymmetric narrowing of it, or even a change of idrection without a noarrowing...

If my interpretation is correct, could you come up with a template that picks up what side of the streak changed shape and in what direction. We would like to know if the streak is ondulating, but its width is constant, or if its width is actually changing periodically.

Also have you run an FFT of your signal? Is there a spike somwhere, or is it the brain picking up a pattern that is not really there?

Cheers

[Not Not Not Luis]

In all seriousness has anyone actually ruled out cosmic rays?

This does look exactly like the charge trails on CCDs. Particularly with
the charge ending in a few pixels and the fact that the cameras alignment is
with the vertical.
The probability is low but certainly non-zero.

It would spoil all the fun of the image processing!

Now talking seriously, I may be naive here, but if ti was a cosmic ray, wouldn't we expect it to come perpendicular to the horizon? Or is this terribly stupid to ask?

Cosmic rays don't "all" have to come from zenith.
What is the latitude of the location?

[Cloudbait]

In all seriousness has anyone actually ruled out cosmic rays?

This does look exactly like the charge trails on CCDs. Particularly with
the charge ending in a few pixels and the fact that the cameras alignment is
with the vertical.
The probability is low but certainly non-zero.

I've made tens of thousands of CCD images over the years, and most have cosmic ray hits (I work at a high altitude). I've never seen a cosmic ray hit that looked like anything in this image. A direct cosmic ray hit produces a saturated pixel (or a small cluster of them). Sometimes, a cosmic ray produces a shower of high energy particles that can show up as tracks of hot pixels on an image. But there is nothing a cosmic ray (or its products) could do to produce the shadow track, and the "explosion" isn't even saturated. A cosmic ray event can be discounted.

[Not Not Not Not Luis]

Cosmic rays don't "all" have to come from zenith.
What is the latitude of the location?

Looking for the latitude I found this link, it summarises most of what has been posted here

http://www.cloudbait.com/science/darwin.html

And I found this info there

The image was made at 12° 28' south, 130° 50.5' east. The camera is facing a little east of south, and is about 500 meters from the wharf. At the time these images were made, the azimuth of the Sun was 249° (WSW) and the altitude (with refraction) was -0.3°, or just below the ideal horizon. However, the Sun's azimuth placed it behind land, so the actual horizon was higher.

[H0meAl0ne]

Following up on the discussion of the straightness (or otherwise) of the trail, here's a least-squares fit to it.

...The key features of note are...that there appears to be a semi-periodic variation in the centreline position (corresponding to a body wobble, and at a frequency that's in the ballpark for a wing beat - 125 pixels ~= 184Hz)...

Amazing! I make it 220 Hz, but why quibble!
And meteors, raindrops, lightning, and all the other theories don't have wing beats.

Good work! As I said before...

Flies and bees have wingbeat frequencies around 200 Hz...[can someone] attempt some sort of analysis on the streak to see if they can discern a regularity to it? Either a regular up and down displacement of the thorax/abdomen, or a preferential shadowing either side of the 'flight path'...[would be] evidence for a periodicity of 200 Hz in the 'dark streak' [and] would tend to disprove most rival hypothesis not involving flying insects, as those hypothesis would lead to predictions of no periodicity."

That would cover meteors, lightning, sub-atomic particles, dark energy, space time warps, CPBs, exploding light bulbs, toy rocket launches, discarded cigarettes, hot pixels, hairs on the lens, CCD degradation, reflected sunlight, planar contrail shadows and Elvis.

You could argue that it would not count against Moire patterns or CCD defects/artifacts, as you could make a case that some sort of regularity may be imposed by the very mechanism that generates these things.

You have found a regularity with the predicted frequency. but there has been an awful lot of directed searching going on (ie many people looking many different ways for a signal and discarding analyses that don't show it). Now can someone repeat that analysis using a different approach / algorithm to see if the purported signal is real? Can you disprove the null hypothesis that there is no discernable signal in the streak? How significant is the result? Can you extract a signal from a patch of sky without the 'streak'. What about the shadow of the wharf (maybe a possible signal due to waves)? Is there any 'binning' effect in the approach you used? Does the jpeg compression algorithm itself cause an artifact?

Good luck.

[Guest]

my first impression was the shadow from a contrail. i seem them occassionally here in Vancouver Canada.
keep smilin...........

If you like conspiracy theory - could be the ionization trail of a particle beam weapon or laser weapon.

[redxeth]

Just 6 pages to go!


Come on people, let's hear your every little thought and idea!


Resistance is futile!

[Guest]

Moe and Joe were in a plane accident. Their plane crashed into the sea and Moe and Joe swam to a small deserted island. After years had gone by, a pop bottle washes ashore. Moe picks it up and looks at it, holsing it so that Joe could see it. Clearly, it was half the length of Moe's body. Moe yelled: "Hey Joe, we've shrunk".

Or did they? ould the bottle really have been a new style, new fad, three foot bottle, or has Moe and Joe shrunk in size.?? Well, you just can't tell. You have no viable frame of reference.

Moe and Joe looked amazed at the bottle. They really could not tell what had happened. But well, after all they were a couple of smart guys and had nothing better to do in their free time, so they engaged in long and endless discussions and thought experiments that could tell them what really happened. After all, they had no means of replicating the experiment at all...

So they spent all of their free time,which in a dessert island is not much, after all you have to fish, keep your hut in one piece, look after your vegetables, keep the fire going, get wood, clean the water, produce clothes to protect yourself from the sun... an the list is endless. I was saying, they spent long hours at night or in between jobs to discuss the possible origin of the bottle. If they found the true answer or not, they never found, but they came to know each other better and kept their minds healthy.

Ocasionally an seagull or a starfish would stick its nose (actually beak or tentacle) and without understanding the true meaning of the game, would again wonder off.

As they discussed the bottle size, Moe became upset that Joe was insisting that it was possible that the bottle actually might be bigger and that no one actually shrunk. After all, it was the most simple and easiest explanation. But Moe would hear nothing of it. He had diagrams in the sand and pictures scratched on cocoanuts 'proving' that somehow they had shrunk.

And soon thereafter, an airplane flew low overhead. The pilot leaned out and looked down at Moe and Joe, who were busily engaged in discussing the bottle size. Moe was so busy with his diagrams and proofs that he didn't look up and wave for help to the pilot. Joe did... and ran off to be rescued were the pilto landed.

The pilot and Joe flew on.. Moe stayed behind trying to prove he had shrunk and he starved to death.

[Dr Science]

In all seriousness has anyone actually ruled out cosmic rays?

This does look exactly like the charge trails on CCDs. Particularly with
the charge ending in a few pixels and the fact that the cameras alignment is
with the vertical.
The probability is low but certainly non-zero.

What could you have been thinking?
Yes. I have. I ruled them out, right now. As soon as you mentioned that silliness, I ruled it out. OK? It is NOT a cosmic ray and it did NOT leave a black (carbon) smoke trail. So.... NEXT THEORY PLEASE.

[Dr Science]

my first impression was the shadow from a contrail. i seem them occassionally here in Vancouver Canada.
keep smilin...........

If you like conspiracy theory - could be the ionization trail of a particle beam weapon or laser weapon.

No, I'm sorry. You are wrong. Nice wild guess though....

[Dr. Science]

I lost that one a long time ago!

When did you lose yours?

While reading this drivel.

So we are all equally brainless. Although you seem to be quite bitter about life. You have all my sympathy. And please come back with any agression or clever remark you wish, it will just reinforce the impression of you that we will keep for posterity.

We are only memory and the remembrance that others keep of us. And as a bitter sowl I will remember you. You have my pitty.

Sorry Luis. You are wrong. You cannot even spell PITY correctly. Nor could you spell SOUL correctly. As such, you are fully qualified to utter inane drivel about what you think this streak is, but you are unqualified to pretent to be knowledgeable. Sorry, your guesses are Wrong!!!

[Dr Science]

Following up on the discussion of the straightness (or otherwise) of the trail, here's a least-squares fit to it.


(click image for a larger version)

This was created by first rotating the trail so it was approximately horizontal (I used the raw data for this image), then finding the best correlation (i.e. minimum least-squares error) between an intensity template approximating the trail and the trail itself.

The horizontal axis corresponds to pixels lengthwise across the trail, the vertical axis is the pixel number perpendicular to the trail (centred at ~100). The red trace (indexed on the left) is the raw best fit, the blue trace (indexed on the right, and slightly offset for clarity) is a smoothed version of it.

The key features of note are that the general shape of the curve corresponds well to the general shape of the curves in the horizontally-compressed images, and that there appears to be a semi-periodic variation in the centreline position (corresponding to a body wobble, and at a frequency that's in the ballpark for a wing beat - 125 pixels ~= 184Hz). Also note the curve matchs well with the observation that the first half of the trail is quite linear, while the second half appears to show a tightening curvature.

The noise at each end of the trail is because the graph begins just before the trail start and ends after it; obviously before the start and after the ends, there's nothing for the algorithm to lock on to.

Nice try, but you are WRONG. This is from Yahoo and its an annual chart of two stocks: AOL and IBM.

[Dr. Science]

Moe and Joe looked amazed at the bottle. They really could not tell what had happened. But well, after all they were a couple of smart guys and had nothing better to do in their free time, so they engaged in long and endless discussions and thought experiments that could tell them what really happened. After all, they had no means of replicating the experiment at all...

So they spent all of their free time,which in a dessert island is not much, after all you have to fish, keep your hut in one piece, look after your vegetables, keep the fire going, get wood, clean the water, produce clothes to protect yourself from the sun... an the list is endless. I was saying, they spent long hours at night or in between jobs to discuss the possible origin of the bottle. If they found the true answer or not, they never found, but they came to know each other better and kept their minds healthy.

Ocasionally an seagull or a starfish would stick its nose (actually beak or tentacle) and without understanding the true meaning of the game, would again wonder off.

Eureka it was a shooting starfish.

But wait, shouldn't the refractive index of the starfish be similar to water ~1.5
not air 1?
If so then the least squares fit to the cornball factor is approximately equal
to merry christmas to the power of eggnog.
The approximate airmass through which the shooting starfish travels could
never cause a contrail with 220Hz wingflap frequency.
Can starfish flap anyway?

A corollary to Arthur Conan Doyle's theory of elimination:
If all other theorys are rediculous then the most obvious one is correct.

It's also called Occam's Razor. And you didn't even need a chart, bug pictures, or ten paragraphs of obscure formulae. Good Work!!

[Dr. Science]

Anoter thougt...

1st. The strange shodow ist realy staight forward - now curves, etc.

2nd. From the beginning to the end it has the same "thickness"

3rd. It seems to have something to do with the bright light in the middle of the picture

Maybe this is an artefact of automatic imageprocessing used in "up to date" digital camaras which are trying to compensate the bright star effect by darkening the affected areas in the picture.

I guess the camara thougt it was fotografing right into the sun and tried to compensate...

What do you think?

Peter

I think you are WRONG!!!!
You cannot spell and you cannot form reasonable sentences - you are right at home here. I especially liked the artefacts, the shodows, anoter, and the fotografing. And I really hate it when the camera decides to take pictures of the sun by itself... If your scientific reasoning is anything like your spelling, give it up now, please.

[Dr. Science]

flies generally don't fly about on their own. its interesting there wasn't 'trails' of others caught by the camera.

i still think it's just the lamp shorting and the digi camera artifacting at the large change in light levels.

I am truly amazed now. All this time, I thought flies actually DID fly about by themselves with their own little wings. Ho ho!! We have them makings of a new radical conspiracy at our fingertips. So, let me be the first to guess how flies actually DO fly about with mysterious help. Could it be... invisible dragonflies carrying them? Could it be "helper fairies"? Could it monkeys from my butt? Well.. you are WRONG. The lamp shorting out did not cast a shadow into space.

[guest]

Have to admit I haven't read *every* post.

First suspected it was an insect or something crossing close to the camera, but this seems too straight. Hypothesis that it's a burning out light with shadow seems reasonable.

But I can't help but think that it is just an artifact in the camera. Perhaps caused by a reflection off the light fixture. Maybe what we are looking at is an accidental "sundial" that just happened to have the camera, light post, and sun all aligned perfectly at the only moment the reflection would happen on any given year, triggering a moire line or ghost of the camera's shutter on the image, or something. I wonder if anyone has submitted this photo to the camera's manufacturer so that their support people might eliminate the possibility of a camera artifact? Seems very suspious that the flash is on the center line of the photo and directly below a circular spot that is probably the exact center of the image. That the light was not working could just be coincidence since it seems a fair number of street lights are non-functional at any given time.

[Philip T]

While I have not read every reply to 'The Streak", my observation is that insufficient information exists to determine a most probable answer. However, my reason for writing is to remark on the differences in the three images, the most notable and possibly as curious as the streak is the "boat" at the far right of the picture. What kind of vessel is it? It looks like a house boat or something with a box like shape. Who were the occupants? What did they see? After the third frame, was the "boat" in other frames? At what speed was the boat moving?

Other questions that come to mind are: Why were the pictures being taken? If it was to study cloud movement, what was the purpose? Why were some lights on/off in different pictures? What was the facility in the picture and how many of the "poles" were for lights and for other purposes? Could the photographer not provide a close up picture of the "light pole" that is at the center of attention?

So many unknowns and attempts to solve, or speculate on the nature of the mystery without gathering other evidence from the scene of the event seems to indicate that it is a spoof.

If it is, it has been fun and very thought provoking. If it is not, the same applies.

[lawrie_williams]

I see a haze of droplets and perhaps ice crystals. Above the cloud there must be a rainbow. I surmise a chance gap in the cloud allowed a portion at one wavelength to "shine" thru, briefly reflecting off the pole and causing the flare we can see. That flare also illuminated the lens and the "shadow" is an artefact of the wavelength and the imaging process.
If this hypothesis is valid there must be a flat surface on the pole at rightangles to a line drawn between the "streak" and a point a few degrees away from the apparent position of the Sun.

[Luis]

Sorry Luis. You are wrong. You cannot even spell PITY correctly. Nor could you spell SOUL correctly. As such, you are fully qualified to utter inane drivel about what you think this streak is, but you are unqualified to pretent to be knowledgeable. Sorry, your guesses are Wrong!!!

Happily I can find refuge in English not being my first language and motivation in the fact that I can speak 3 languages but only knowing how to spell one.

Thanks for the spelling corrections. Constructive criticism is the basis of progress and self-motivation.

Keep on with the good work.

[Luis]

Following up on the discussion of the straightness (or otherwise) of the trail, here's a least-squares fit to it.


(click image for a larger version)

This was created by first rotating the trail so it was approximately horizontal (I used the raw data for this image), then finding the best correlation (i.e. minimum least-squares error) between an intensity template approximating the trail and the trail itself.

The horizontal axis corresponds to pixels lengthwise across the trail, the vertical axis is the pixel number perpendicular to the trail (centred at ~100). The red trace (indexed on the left) is the raw best fit, the blue trace (indexed on the right, and slightly offset for clarity) is a smoothed version of it.

The key features of note are that the general shape of the curve corresponds well to the general shape of the curves in the horizontally-compressed images, and that there appears to be a semi-periodic variation in the centreline position (corresponding to a body wobble, and at a frequency that's in the ballpark for a wing beat - 125 pixels ~= 184Hz). Also note the curve matchs well with the observation that the first half of the trail is quite linear, while the second half appears to show a tightening curvature.

The noise at each end of the trail is because the graph begins just before the trail start and ends after it; obviously before the start and after the ends, there's nothing for the algorithm to lock on to.

Nice try, but you are WRONG. This is from Yahoo and its an annual chart of two stocks: AOL and IBM.

Exactly, it looks very much like a random signal. Can someone FFT it and find if there is really a pattern?

[victorengel]

You have found a regularity with the predicted frequency. but there has been an awful lot of directed searching going on (ie many people looking many different ways for a signal and discarding analyses that don't show it). Now can someone repeat that analysis using a different approach / algorithm to see if the purported signal is real? Can you disprove the null hypothesis that there is no discernable signal in the streak? How significant is the result? Can you extract a signal from a patch of sky without the 'streak'. What about the shadow of the wharf (maybe a possible signal due to waves)? Is there any 'binning' effect in the approach you used? Does the jpeg compression algorithm itself cause an artifact?

Good luck.

Does visually count? Here's a procedure that's very easy. Take the trail of your choice (many to choose from on this thread) and rotate it so that it's horizontal. In Photoshop do a motion blur of distance 50 pixels and 34 degrees (or 0 degrees if it's already rotated).

[Guest]

When is someone going to take their camera and make a picture of bees flying by?

[Guy_d]

Could you describe how carefully you 'inspected' the lamppost?
Did you actually get a ladder, and look at the top of the lamp housing closely? What sort of bulb is the lamp - high pressure arc, flourescent, or filament? Why is it not working?

I'd like to know if there is maybe a small hole in the top of the lamp housing, with damage to the transformer/ballast inside.

Was the camera manned, or on automatic timelapse? The point being, were you (the photographer) there at the time, and if this event caused a bang, would you have noticed?

[guydATzip.com.au]

That a very tiny alien spaceship was sitting on top of the lamp pole, as its very very tiny occupants admired the view. Then they got bored and engaged warp drive, at about a 45 degree angle upwards. Its a pretty crappy view, after all.

If only we had _two_ pictures from different angles, we could project the line outwards into space, and work out where they were heading next.
So we could send them a bill for the broken lightbulb.