Mysterious Multi-Colored Light Patterns in Sky Over Reno, Nevada

Originally posted by Tom Waits For Nobody
Suppose here is as good a place as any to say that Georgia should be added to the list. I just saw one tonight (rather, this morning) from 2:30 AM to about 5:00 and took several pictures. This is actually my first post to ATS and the reason I joined... I hadn't even heard of this phenomenon until I Google searched to see if there was some sort of an explanation or anyone else who had witnessed this.

Sorry the images are rather small. Anyone know of any great image hosting sites that I could use, possibly with resizing capabilities that aren't restrained to making images smaller? I'm not terribly worried about the pixelation. I cropped out a lot of space, but here's a little bit of what I've got...

img18.imageshack.us...
img19.imageshack.us...
img16.imageshack.us...
img6.imageshack.us...



To let it be known, I was using a Minolta 5D with a 300 zoom lens. The 5D comes with an automatic stabilizing feature that was turned on, and I was also using a tripod for most of the shots that I took.

Glad to become a part of the community.

THAT'S A STAR CALLED SIRIUS.

So Sirius is back on view and so are the multicolored light shows. Of course these strange shapes are only seen in the video recordings. They aren't seen like this by eye. The cause is camera shake, together with light scintillation due to atmospheric turbulance.

To demo the effect, I video'd Sirius through a large telescope fitted with a CCD camera. The scope was solidly mounted, so all I had to do was track the star's path to keep it near center frame. There's a photo of my 'scope lower down.

To demo the flashing light shapes, I had to create camera shake. With a 10" Meade, that's more difficult than you may think. It needs just enough vibration to jiggle the image without losing it from the frame completely. I managed to get a reasonble jiggle by punching the mounting with my fist. This caused a figure 8 type of vibration, which translates to the image. With a hand held camera, the jiggles are very much more random of course.

To complete the experiment, I repeatedly defocussed the star's image to create the so-called Airy Ring pattern (which it's not, but no matter). This ring is analogus to hundreds of 'donut' type UFOs seen on YouTube. These are especially relevant to the giant 'alien ships' proposed by David Sereda in the well known NASA STS-75 Tether Incident.

The Meade Telescope

Sirius tracked Normally

Sirius with Camera Jiggle

Defocussed Star Image

WG3

Hi I just joined the forum because I saw something very strange over Reno, Nevada last night between 9:45 and 10:45 PM, and I am hoping some others might have seen it too. While me and my girlfriend were driving back home last night, she noticed some strange lights that did not look like a plane or a helicopter. There was a red light in the middle that was flashing, and that did not seem to be out of the ordinary at first. What made it very strange was that there was a ring of white lights right under the flashing red light, and it was easy to see that it was a round sort of craft, as the white lights were flashing in sort of a circular way around the craft. About 10 min later we saw what was obviously a helicopter, and it appeared to fly towards the strange object. After calling the Reno police department today, I know that they had their police chopper out last night, although the person who I was talking to was not very helpful. So the craft that we saw had about the same speed as a helicopter, but it was very strange because at one point it was hovering in the same spot for about 15 minutes, and then kept moving from one side of Reno to the other. We drove downtown to get a closer look, and it seemed like it was about 300 feet off of the ground, and it came very close to us, and my GF said that as it started to turn, it appeared to morph somehow, i couldn't keep my eye on it for very long as I was driving. Did anybody else see this in Reno? It was there for almost 45 min before we eventually lost sight of it. Unfortunately we were not able to get pictures or video, as my camera is a POS.