I’d like to mention a few things about the UFO photographs I recently posted.
After considering the first photo, before having taken the second, I thought we were just pulling out of the dock, maybe the engines churned up enough froth to actually hurl a drop of water that high (we’re talking 30 or 40 feet above the water level).
That, I thought, would explain the blurred appearance, if it were relatively close and I were focused on infinity. The part of the dock on the photo wasn’t blurred so that didn’t make total sense.
So yesterday on the way back from the bank I stopped at Richmond Beach and took some photos, and I get back and I’m processing those, and what do I see?
Another object that looks identical to the first except it is farther away and the sun is at a different angle. This would have placed the object in almost the same location as it was last August (Edmonds being farther north of Richmond Beach).
So now I thought of things like, could it be a plane or bird far enough away that it just wasn’t sharp enough to discern?
This image was about six pixels wide but the previous image was more than double that. And yet, there are other objects that are visible that are only 1-2 pixels wide in the same photo, so the lens had sufficient resolving power to resolve something cleanly onto the sensor. The fuzzy appearance of the object appears to be a property largely of the object itself.
I also took some pictures of airplanes and helicopters and birds at the resolution limit of the camera and you can make out what they are down to the point where structure, wings, etc, are only one pixel wide and become unrecognizable or disappear.
With really high contrast items, like some of the things around the house and tree parts, near the limit of resolution chromatic aberration becomes an issue (but you don’t see it much in those images because I cleaned it up with Paintshop Pro) but not with low contrast subjects.
So I use the term UFO in the most literal sense, I don’t know what these objects are but I know reasonably well what they are not, not a plane, bird, helicopter, or a common form of balloon, (though I can’t rule out some less common form, mylar weather balloon or something along those lines).
Whatever these things are they either match the color and brightness of the sky very closely, intentionally stealthy, or they are translucent or semi-transparent allowing the sky to be seen through them. If they were merely highly reflective their undersides would be dark reflecting the water beneath them but this is not the case.
