UFO sighting or what?

Rocketdork · Post by **Rocketdork** » Wed Apr 13, 2005 8:59 am

A friend here at work took this photo. In the photo you'll find a series of dots in a very straight line, its near the pine tree in the foreground. I cropped and blew up the picture so you can see the detail in this photo.

I don't seriously think its a UFO, but I am interested in what you think would cause this.

Some info on the photo;
Exposure time - 16S
F-Stop - 4.0
14.6mm Focal length
One chip sensor
Kodak DX4900 camera.

My best guess is that is a meteor that got caught in the scan rate of the CCD. A digital camera scans each individual pixel of the CCD very quickly. On a long exposure, it does this several times. If a very fast event comes along, like a meteor, it doesn't record it as a streak, like a film camera does, but maybe a set of dots like we see in this photo?

All speculation on my part...I don't really know.

What do you think?

bugfreezer · Post by **bugfreezer** » Wed Apr 13, 2005 10:45 am

Sorta like your rocket video topic....

If it is not an an artifact of CCD processing AND orbital transit of a satellite or the ISS (there was enough light at that angle to reflect back on earth), it could be multiple pieces of something entering the atmosphere, but I did not notice any contrail - at least it was not clear in the blowup. Did the shooter notice the dots at the time of the photo shoot?