The photographer stated that this appeared to be some sort of alien portal directly in front of the sun. I thought, maybe some weird overload response to the intensity of the sun, but then noticed the violet also in the reflection below.
After looking at this a bit more I find it interesting how the purple hazy area around this has a similar pattern to the fuzzy area around the other orb photos. Those by the way are not simply out of focus. A person I’ve been in contact with up in Surrey has looked at them through at telescope and that fuzziness is an intrinsic part of their nature. Maybe it’s something they’re doing to the surrounding atmosphere.
Hi, I see these alien portals each time I try to take a picture of the sun with my digital camera.
Could it be that the dark spot is caused by the digital captors not able to treat the high brightness of the sun and replacing the corresponding pixels by black ones ?
It’s entirely possible. My camera, Canon Powershot S2 IS, does not react in this manner, but other digital cameras may. It also could have been done in PhotoShop.
The odds of a rare phenomena like this lining up perfectly with the sun, from the perspective of the photographer, would seem remote.
The orb photos I’ve taken weren’t an overload phenomena. The same orbs show up on the Google maps satellite imagery. I have know some of the other orb photographers well enough to feel confident that what they photographed was real.
You can see the purple color of the mist surrounding it in the reflection. It is about the same angular size as the orbs which I know are a real phenomena. It has a similar fuzzy edge that they have. So I can’t discount the possibility that it may be a real phenomena.
I reported it as described by the photographer and note that there is enough in common with the orb images that I can’t rule out that there might be a reality to it.
I wasn’t there, I have no way of knowing one way or the other. There are similarities to real phenomena.
I put it up here for people to view and consider. Others might notice something in common with photographs they’ve taken or try intentionally overloading their cameras to see if they get the same effect.
The black is caused by blooming (excess electrons causing bit overflow in the sensor/processing.) Take an enormously bright subject (the sun) and you are going to overload the sensor. The overload then causes an overflow on the sensor, like flipping an odometer. 99,999 becomes 00,000. White gets pushed over the edge and becomes black.
As for the purple fringing, that’s called chromatic aberration. It can be related to blooming although it’s related to excessive light passing through cheap lenses. It manifests itself different ways, with purple fringing being very common.
Chromatic Aberration
Neither of these are rare phenomena.
I’m afraid I disagree with you on both of these matters. Sensors are inherently analog devices even though the output is digitized, and the camera software generally knows what the maximum and minimum values the sensor is capable of and doesn’t “roll over” like an odometer.
You can take a look at my photo gallery, http://www.eskimo.com/~nanook/gallery, and you will find many cases of direct sun exposure without any “odometer rollover”.
Second issue, chromatic aberration, also, given my interest and background in photography, not a foreign concept; but chromatic aberration generally manifests itself as a green fringe on the opposite side of a purple fringe, but this photograph it’s purple in both directions, not purple in one direction and green in the other, so chromatic aberration doesn’t explain the purple fringe either.
And all of that is taking this in a vacuum, ignoring all the other photographs of silver spheres in which no chromatic aberration is apparent, and such a sphere directly lined up with the sun would appear black owing to the high contrast ratio.
The rollover I refer to happens before any processing. The photosite values are maxed out to to being overloaded by excessive photons from the sun. Neighboring photosites are maxed too. Electrically, the electrons bleed into other neighboring photosites, pushing the maxed out bits over the edge, flipping it back to zero (11111111 + 00000001 = 00000000). Some sensors handle it better than others.
Then again, it’s hard to suggest how this works to a person that thinks a picture taken of the sun with a $200 camera is revealing an alien portal, especially if a purple circle is also magically round like an orb’s circle. Now that’s proof!
On second look of the photo, this would explain the purple fringing too. It isn’t optical or the result of the in-camera processing. It is a boundary condition of the excessive electron rollover. You see this affect in either or both sides of the total byte RGB color value, where red is represented in the MSB range and blue is the LSB range. Take black or white, subtract a bit and you go from back to white or vice versa. But do it with a few more bits and you’ll get some slight red and/or slight blue, but not green.
I’ve been working in graphics for about 25 years, with six years of that at the bit level of color processing. Rotating or overloading RGB byte values are tricks we use to get different effects, especially in early videos games from the 80’s like the color cycling you see in Robotron.
25 years ago (1982) computer graphics were black and white blocks.
I run what is, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest ISP in America; I’m also into photography, the first twenty years or so film, the last seven or so, digital. I’ve had three digital cameras in that time, none of them reacted this way when pointed at the sun.
Beyond that though, you don’t read, you just skim, taken by itself, I would agree that more likely than not this is just some form of overload distortion.
Given the similarity to objects which are definitely not overload phenomena, which have been photographed by numerous people including myself on three occasions, and which even show up in the satellite imagery Google uses for Google Maps and Google Earth, I felt it worth posting.
If you want to get at the truth of something then you will examine all the data instead of just discarding that which doesn’t fit your beliefs.