Saucer on my Egypt pic?

Well done my friend. Thats no bird, plane, helicopter or any conventional aircraft I know of so you obviously caught a picture of something out of the ordinary.

Egypt must be a pretty interesting place, did you visit Abydos Temple in Giza by any chance?

Originally posted by drinkinlikeafish
Egypt must be a pretty interesting place, did you visit Abydos Temple in Giza by any chance?

Visited like 9 templesor somehing, but I dont think I was at Abydos.

Anorwegianguy1972, I must agree that it's one of the better UFO pics I have seen (yes, I'm on your side on this one), but I'm afraid, even with all the "proof" given already the chance that it's a bird cannot be ruled out. (The "size arguments didn't convince me at all and remains debatable.)

Shutter speed plays an enormous role in pictures - no secret there. You'll be amazed at how much difference shutter speed makes to movement in a picture. I'm not familiar with your camera but most digital cameras are automatic and they're pretty smart when it comes to choosing shutter speed, aperture, focussing, etc. Amazing technology if you really look into it. In this case we have no idea what the shutter speed was, thus we cannot rule out that it could have been a fast flying bird. The fact that you're taking a picture of a slow moving (err... stationary) object and the fact that there's more than enough light, is convincing evidence that the camera chose a slower shutter speed. No amount of zooming, or other photo editing will change the fact that it'll be a blur if the shutter speed was to slow.

To show my point, take a look at these two pictures:
With slow shutter speed:


With fast shutter speed:


It's clear that the shapes and forms are completely different, just because of the shutter speed.

Now let's look at what slow speeds do to fast flying birds:
Example 1
Example 2 (Yes these are birds!)
Do you agree that these shapes could be anything - even after I told you it was birds?

Ok, that said, I wouldn't rule out "alien spacecraft" either. It is really a UFO in the true sense, and your ability to pic up such small detail in these pictures gets my respect!

You are wrong, the more light there is the *faster* the shutter speed is, if it is dark the shutter is slower, thus letting more light expose the film. This was about 8 in the morning in May and it was extreemly bright. The camera I am using is capeble of 1/2,000 second shutter speed and I think that no bird would make motion blurr at that kind of shutter speed. Also there is alot of people moving in the un-cropped picture, but there are no other motion blurr from swinging arms etc.

Read more about my camera here:
www.photoxels.com...



[edit on 26-9-2005 by anorwegianguy1972]

Originally posted by anorwegianguy1972
You are wrong, the more light there is the *faster* the shutter speed is, if it is dark the shutter is slower, thus letting more light expose the film. This was about 8 in the morning in May and it was extreemly bright. The camera I am using is capeble of 1/2,000 second shutter speed and I think that no bird would make motion blurr at that kind of shutter speed. Also there is alot of people moving in the un-cropped picture, but there are no other motion blurr from swinging arms etc.

Read more about my camera here:

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to debunk your pic as a bird at all; I'm just saying not to discard the possibility so "fast".

Just by taking a look at the picture without any enhancing, don't you agree that there is a blur?

I was making assumptions about the possible shutter speed your camera chose. I may be wrong in my theory - it's debatable. One photographer will differ from the next and I'm no professional to say the least. We can start to talk about the influence of aperture, light influence and focus as well. And what was the "shooting mode" it was in?
That is not the point. Yes, your camera has a capability of 15 - 1/2000 shutter speed. But no matter how much we read about your camera, we still won't know what the speed was when you took the picture.

I didn't want to go so technically into this - and I won't dig any deeper into this. My examples (pictures) should be enough to show just how much difference one setting of a camera it can make in the resulting picture. And there are quite a few settings to choose from.

You understand what I'm saying? I want it to be an alien craft as much as you and everyone else, but we can't throw all plausible answers out of the window that easily.

Dont get me wrong, I really appreciate your input. Thank you for your insight Automatic cameraes usually use the fastest shutter speed when there is alot of light, like it was that day. There IS motion blurr on the object, but on none of the people, causing me to think the object was moving way much faster than a bird.

anorwegianguy1972,

What was the focus of your photo? In other words, were you taking a picture of the sky, or the temple?

The focus to me seems more on the sky than the temple. One could argue that your hands were bumped or what-have-you and caused the focus to be on the sky by accident. But there would be motion blur with that.

I understand you cropped it...may I have a copy of the unedited version? u2u me, if so please - thanks

Originally posted by ignotus
I understand you cropped it...may I have a copy of the unedited version? u2u me, if so please - thanks

The link to raw dump from the camera is on page two of this post.

Originally posted by anorwegianguy1972

Originally posted by ignotus
I understand you cropped it...may I have a copy of the unedited version? u2u me, if so please - thanks

The link to raw dump from the camera is on page two of this post.

My sincerest apologies. Somehow I skipped from page 1 to page 3

One thing to conclude - it's not a bird.
The perspective shows that it isn't a bug either.

I don't know what it is. It's flying, its an object, and I can't identify it.
UFO? I think so.

The shutter speed to take the pics here was at 1/250th of a second.

[edit on 27-9-2005 by Xabora]

Originally posted by Xabora
The shutter speed to take the pics here was at 1/250th of a second.

I promised I wouldn't go this technically into it, but I've got nothing better to do, so if you'll allow me my fun, can we do a little calculation? Just to prove my point further that camera settings plays a huge role when trying to analyze a photograph.

I can be wrong - but a (digital/automatic) camera won't choose the fastest shutter speed unless it's on the "action" or "sports" setting. The best speed for taking pictures is 1/60 but this will also be debated amongst professional photographers. But this is suggested to amateurs/beginners.

Now Xabora suggested that the speed was 1/250 - and he's proven himself enough in this thread that I'll believe him. How did you (Xabora) get that speed, if you’d be so kind as to explain?

We'll need the following variables to do our calculations:
Actual lens focal length (mm)?
We know for the Canon 500 SD has the following specifications:
Wide angle actual (mm) 7.7 (37 : 35mm equivalent)
Telephoto actual (mm) 23.1 (111 : 35 mm equivalent)
Which one did you use? (We're going to use the actual length and not the 35 mm equivalent.)
Selected aperture?
Now, you probably won't know this one for certain either - as with the shutter speed. It might help us if you knew the setting the camera was on, i.e. portrait, landscape, etc.?
Subject distance
This will be the distance from you to the temple (in feet or meters will be fine).
Circle of confusion
This value for your camera is know as 0.006 mm (calculated using 0.030 mm as the reference circle of confusion (CoC) for 35mm format).
(The circle of confusion is a term relating to the fuzziest a point can be and still be called "in focus".)

Now, I'm probably shooting myself in the foot here, because looking at the picture you definitely have pretty good depth of field here... But if I prove myself wrong, then we've proven decisively that it's not a bird.

Im leaning toward a mundane explaination for this one. Why?

Because Norweiganguy did not notice the object when he shot the picture, only after he was looking at them long after.

Daylight discs, as this type of sighting is known, tend to get noticed fast. Even in large cities, with tall buildings, trees, and clouds to obstruct the view of the sky, people still have no problem spotting a sudden appearance of a strange disc shaped flying object, even in less than ideal circumstances.

Now, we see in this picture, thst this wasnt taken in a large metroplis. The weather conditions were great, the sky is crystal clear. The sun is very bright. Had this indeed been a genuine flying disc, you would have seen it, or someone, out of all those tourists, would have seen it. In sunshine that bright, with as unobstructed a view as you had, just the glare alone shining off the metalic surface would have caught someones attention. In the desert, such objects are even more easily spotted from very great distances. Given also the bizarre maneuvers that UFOs are known to perform, it would have been even more noticeable. There were lots of people there, yet no one took any notice of it. Even as you were snapping the photo, you did not see it. If it was a 30 foot wide metalic flying ship, you would have been able to see it easily from very great distances. After all, you can see airplanes 37,000 feet, about 7 miles, away, up in the air.

If no one out of these many people noticed it, I can only regard it as probably mundane. It could be a number of things. Size and distance are not to be trusted in photos unless you are a qualified expert. The object in the photo does not look that big either.

A good question is, when you were there, did you notice any commotion, sudden flurry of activity, or panic amongst the other people? If you saw any sudden odd behavior, this could be an indication that others did indeed see a very strange object.

Originally posted by Gemwolf
Now Xabora suggested that the speed was 1/250 - and he's proven himself enough in this thread that I'll believe him. How did you (Xabora) get that speed, if you’d be so kind as to explain?

Actually, there's a whole host of free software out there, and some which comes with more sophisticated cameras, that'll analyze that basic information for you, which is imbedded in the digital file itself...

Shutter speed is correct - 1/250 sec
Aperture was f/7
No flash used
1.4x (50mm) zoom

Now, I'm probably shooting myself in the foot here, because looking at the picture you definitely have pretty good depth of field here... But if I prove myself wrong, then we've proven decisively that it's not a bird.

I think you're bang-on....the low aperture provides a very high DOF...This object in the background is a good distance away from these very large and immediate structures....

Not quite sure what to make of it right now…

Lots of great investigaing here On the question of how far I was from the structures I would assume about 200 m from the rightmost structure you see in the back (Karnak temple).

When it comes to why no one noticed it your guess is as good as mine, some suggestions are:

1. It was only visible for a short moment; cloaked or *swoosh'ed* away
2. People did notice it; I remember seeing a UFO when I was in the army waiting for a ferry, there was lots of other people there when a bright donot like object lit suddenly appeared out in the waters, people must have noticed it like me but no one yelled out in panic or extacy, me neither. I figure if I shouted "FLYING SAUSER !!" they would all think I was mad and beat me with sticks When it comes to the Egypt UFO I dont think I could see it with the naked eye, it would just be a spot in the horizon to me, I only saw it when going through the pictures at a later date, if you download the raw dump from the camera you will see what I mean, its just a speck in the sky until you zoom up.

Ok, let's do this... LoL...
We've got everything, I think.
Shutter Speed 1/125
Aperture f/7
Actual focal length... Well, EnronOutrunHomerun suggested it's 50mm (We'll get back to this value at a later time)...
Distance from the subject: 200 meters
Circle of Confusion: 0.006 mm as a known for the camera.

Hyperfocal distance, near distance of acceptable sharpness, and far distance of acceptable sharpness are calculated using the following equations (from Greenleaf, Allen R., Photographic Optics, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1950, pp. 25-27):
Hyperfocal distance:



Near distance of acceptable sharpness:



Far distance of acceptable sharpness:



where:

H is the hyperfocal distance, mm

f is the lens focal length, mm

s is the focus distance

Dn is the near distance for acceptable sharpness

Df is the far distance for acceptable sharpness

N is the f-number

c is the circle of confusion, mm

So, enough of that, the answer is:
Near limit of acceptable sharpness - 45.2 m
Far limit of acceptable sharpness - Infinity
Total depth of field - Infinite
Depth of field in front of subject - 154.8 m
Depth of field behind subject - Infinite
Hyperfocal distance - 58.5 m

Ok, what does all this babble mean? When a lens is focused on an object, there is some distance in front of the object and some behind which will also be acceptably sharp. This zone of sharpness which includes the subject is called the depth of field. This is what we calculated here. The results thus tell us that the depth of field for this photograph is infinite... In plain words, anything behind the "subject" (the temple) would theoretically be in focus!


With all the information we have, we know that the CCD chip "exposure" was 1/4 sec.

Thus for the object (UFO) to be a blur like it is here it had to be moving at great speed!

Right... If that made any sense to anyone... Make of it what you want...

I see that there are some real smart people here, I did not really understand all that, Gemwolf, but I read your conclusion I cant see the pictures in your post though, perhaps you should try and upload them www.putfile.com or www.imageshack.us, they are usually pretty reliable.

One more this, is it possible to estimate how fast or how close the object is, I know that there is a certain point where every camera object in focus becomes "infinite" far awaym but is it possible to say how far it atleast has to be from the camera?


[edit on 28-9-2005 by anorwegianguy1972]

Well, Norweigan guy, you could be right. Im simply presenting one view point.

i do believe in te existance of UFOs and such, but in each case, I try and rule out anything mundane.

From the photo, I cant tell you much about this sighting. Its simply a fuzzy blur, which tells me nothing. I am only going on the circumatsances of the incident, to figure out why no one else really noticed, despite excellent conditions. That puzzles me. Even UFOs flying at supersonic speeds have been spotted by people simply by their suddent lightning like maneuvers.

Mind you, I do not doubt your sincerity or your credibility. I do believe you are puzzled by the object in your photos, and are trying to find an explaiantion. Yours is not the first case of someone shooting a UFO and not knowing it. Its just that such geniune UFOs are extremely rare. I know of only two photos that are very credible and solid, one taken in Hawaaii, and one taken in British Columbia, where the photographer did not notice the object when taking the picture.

You should try and submit it to a professional UFO org for more indepth analysis. It could very well be that maybe someone did see, it, but like many UFO witnesses, either did not report it for fear of ridicule, or did not believe thier eyes. Maybe no one did notices it, perhaps everyone was so excited about visiting the ruins that no one payed attention. I myself would have noticed, as I am always hyper-aware of my surroundings, perhaps because im naturally alert and paranoid.

Either way, i honestly dont know whats in your photo, as photo analysis is not my specialty.

Originally posted by anorwegianguy1972
I see that there are some real smart people here, I did not really understand all that, Gemwolf, but I read your conclusion

Err... I wouldn't exactly say "real smart"... Just informed...

Originally posted by anorwegianguy1972
I cant see the pictures in your post though

I can't edit the post anymore (the pics worked fine when I posted yesterday...?), but here's what it's supposed to look like:

Hyperfocal distance:


Near distance of acceptable sharpness:


Far distance of acceptable sharpness:


Depth of Field - Hyperfocal:

Originally posted by anorwegianguy1972
One more this, is it possible to estimate how fast or how close the object is, I know that there is a certain point where every camera object in focus becomes "infinite" far awaym but is it possible to say how far it atleast has to be from the camera?

I thought about this. But there's too many variables we don't know. Trying to estimate the distance or size of the object would be plain guesswork... Unless there's someone "smarter" ( ) who can do such a calculation...
We might be able to estimate the speed of the object - I'll have a quick look into this.

Originally posted by Gemwolf

Originally posted by Xabora
The shutter speed to take the pics here was at 1/250th of a second.

Now Xabora suggested that the speed was 1/250 - and he's proven himself enough in this thread that I'll believe him. How did you (Xabora) get that speed, if you’d be so kind as to explain?

Sorry typo, I ment exposure time. >_<

[edit on 9/30/2005 by Amorymeltzer]

I didn't have time to look at the other replies, so forgive me if someone already suggested this, which I'm sure they have, but it appears to me as if you have a picture of a large flying near the pyramids.