Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Starting from a punctual object (O1), completely in focus, the light rays, after going through the lens, will pass through the center (O3) of the diaphragm and then through the second lens, ending in the photographic film in a point (F1), completely in focus.

On the other hand, starting from a punctual object (O2), completely out of focus, the light rays, after going through the lens, would converge at the point O4, but some of the light rays will be blocked by the diaphragm. Only part of it will pass through.

This part is, in fact, a cone with thousands of rays of light. Between points O3 and O4 we have what is called the circle of minimum confusion. As only light will pass, out of focus, through the diaphragm, and it blocks part of the light rays, then the physical shape of the diaphram is imprinted to the photographic film.

Spherical Aberration

It occurs when the objective lens is incapable of focusing the outer and axial rays in the same point. Because of the lens curvature, the borders are thinner while the center is thicker. If the lens is hit by parallel rays, they will pass through different thicknesses in the lens, and will therefore form many different focus points.

An objective lens with spherical aberration will form a diffuse image with little contrast in all visual field. We can reduce the problem closing the diaphragm, using only the central region of the lens.

An objective lens is composed of many elements, going from 7 up to 15 lenses, depending on its quality. This is all to eliminate or reduce the aberrations.

In the image below, we can see that a light was cut out of the original photo, to the right. It generated a coma reflection, to the left (notice the symmetry). Around the reflection we also see a good example of spherical aberration, forming a big ring.

This effect is very common on night films seen on the movies or TV, when car headlights are filmed coming towards the camera. It’s also very clear with TV studio light spots.

Out of focus

Something very similar happens with unfocused images. If we have the focus on a person, for instance, and in the background we have one or more lights, those will be out of focus, and reach the camera on that circle of minimum confusion.

This will imprint the image of the diaphragm on the photo. If we have a diaphragm with five parts, as in the example above, then the unfocused images will have that shape: a pentagon. If the diaphragm has six parts, as in the example below, we will have hexagons. And so on.

The same thing happens if you photograph a light source very closely, with the focus set to infinite. IN the example above, the small holes were captured in film as hexagons, as the diaphragm of the camera had six parts. At left, it’s also possible to see a reddish spherical aberration.

In this photo we can see that it’s out of focus, since the hexagons are all parallel to each other. If they were on a curve, they would align toward a common point.

Coma

The coma aberration happens when an objective lens is incapable of forming a puncutal oblique image, producing instead an asymmetrical light area. The light rays are reflected by the internal lenses and reach the film.

This aberration is the one most often confused with UFOs. See the example above of a photo that was cropped. In the uncropped photo, there will always be a symmetry of the source and the reflection in relation to the center of the photograph.

It’s always important to analyze the negatives to verify if the photograph wasn’t developed with cropping. See some examples below.

Cropped

Uncropped

Symmetry highlighted

Out of the visual field

Another interesting visual effect mistaken with UFOs occurs when the source of the light lies outside the visual field of the camera, but insed the visual field of the first lens (the outermost lens).

Those are usually taken almost against the Sun. This effect can be avoided by using a shade. See two examples below:

If you read and understood this article, you will probably start to look at UFO photos with a different view. You may also watch TV in a different way, noticing the many squares, pentagons, hexagons and polygons in general that appear all the time, as well as the Coma and spherical aberrations.

– By Claudeir Covo, ufologist and president of the Brazilian National Institute of Aerospatial Phenomena Investigation – INFA
And Paola Lucherini Covo, ufologist and secretary of INFA

Translated with their kind permission

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted in Science,Skepticism,UFO photos,UFOs | No comments

CAELESTIA was initiated in 1994. Its purpose: to collect, investigate and document reports of unidentified aerial phenomena. The name CAELESTIA is borrowed from Latin and can best be translated as “affairs of the heavens”. The general idea behind the initiative was – and still is – that reports of “Unidentified Flying Objects” deserve a more correct treatment, be it from the scientific community or from the UFO community itself.

Special notice to the superb picture galleries, with an extensive list of objects and phenomena that can be mistaken for UFOs. The resarch & discussion also has some nice work, including an evaluation of the Belgian UFO wave, as as the case examples.

[via Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Posted in Fortean,Science,Skepticism,UFO photos,UFOs | No comments

“I’m completely stunned. Please, help me find out if this is true. Note: image taken on the Pinheiros highway, near the Joao Dias bridge”
[Sao Paulo, Brazil].

Skeptics would immediately think this is nothing more than a small guy in a costume, but careful viewing of the video reveals the head of the strange figure is actually on fire.

We blogged about it in Brazil, and soon Marcus Pontes came with an explanation:

“Some years ago a Brazilian artist wanted to make a movie about the curupira [a folkloric figure in Brazil], and he flooded the internet with videos and other false information to give the movie project some urban legend aura.”

Soon afterwards Marcus pointed a link to the original blog where the artist publicized his viral creations: http://neminventonemaumento.zip.net/

Alexandre Camargo also told us that

“It’s really a digital work: the ‘creature’ is the main character of a short horror film produced by Trattoria di Frame (in São Paulo), where I worked some years ago. The designer is the artist Eduardo Schaal.”

Check some more nice images and videos of the creature after the jump

Keep reading

Popularity: 11% [?]

Posted in Criptozoology,Ghosts | 1 comment

Back in April a nine meters basking shark was caught in a fishing net four kilometres off Hitachi, Ibaraki. Weighing in at 4,6 tonnes, it’s the largest basking shark specimen ever found in Japan.

To the cryptozoology enthusiasts, like me, one image of the news item immediately reminded the famous carcass of a supposed plesiosaur caught in 1977 by the Zuiyo Maru:

The similarity is no coincidence, as it’s suggested the carcass was actually a pseudoplesiosaur, which is, it was indeed a basking shark carcass. Glen Kuban has a nice reference about it on Sea-monster or Shark? An Analysis of a Supposed Plesiosaur Carcass Netted in 1977. 

Popularity: 15% [?]

Posted in Criptozoology | 9 comments

Via The Anomalist, a nice essay by Mike Baron: Peak Oil and the Fermi Paradox.

The hydrocarbon energy available to a planetary civilization is analogous to the yolk of an egg: just as the yolk offers a newly emerged creature needed energy to break out of the egg and get established in the wider world, so too does a planet’s hydrocarbon energy deposits provide an emergent technological civilization the boost it needs to leave its birthworld and establish itself in its solar system. It offers a very brief window of opportunity to allow a species to develop the technologies and techniques to bootstrap itself off of its planet of origin. Once out into space, a civilization can take advantage of the thousandfold greater material and energy resources found across the solar system. Meanwhile the birthworld can rest and regenerate from its difficult birthing.

This adds to Drake’s equation and the Rare Earth hypothesis to solve the Fermi Paradox. It’s very interesting to emphasize the concept of a small window of opportunity for a civilization to leave the gravity well of its home-planet, but there are some problems for this to be a simple answer to the Italian physicist’s paradox.

The Peak Oil Apocalipse scenario is greatly exaggerated. It may put some stress on our economical and political systems, but the risk we may blow up the planet because of that is still lower than it was during the whole Cold War, when for most of the time oil was extremely cheap.

If a civilization manages to survive the age of a cheap and easily accessible hydrocabon energy source, even if did not manage to colonize space, it will be able to do that if it wants. And the lack of cheap oil may even be a strong incentive to colonize space, as cheap energy sources may lie outside the home-planet. A specially beautiful idea mentioned by Carl Sagan was to use nuclear warheads as fuel for nuclear pulse rockets.

The point is, as long as a technological civilization with a sufficiently developed science exists, it will be able to colonize space if it really wants to do that. Besides the energy stored in nuclear fuels, the energy required to put something into orbit is lower than the solar energy it may collect and direct back to the Earth, for instance. It may all be more expensive than cheap oil, and the total energy available to us my decrease substantially, but as long as science and technology exists, the colonization of space and the possible discovery and access to new sources of cheap energy are always a possibility.

Another interesting point, though, is also advanced by John Micheal Greer on Solving Fermi’s Paradox.

Greer too emphasizes the limited amount of cheap non-renewable energy and the implications of that to the Fermi paradox. But he also notes that besides the gravity well of the home-planet, there’s also the huge vacuum between the planetary systems.

So, even if a civilization manages to colonize some of the planets in its own solar system, that’s still a small step compared to the huge jump ahead. Difficult as interplanetary colonization my look, it’s close to nothing compared to interstellar colonization.

That’s very true, but again, I don’t think energy would be a fundamental problem making interstellar colonization impossible — at least not for an interplanetary civilization. As long as the civilization continues to develop science and technology and doesn’t annihilate itself, its main star will be providing plenty of energy that could be collected, stored and used for interstellar travel. But as for leaving the home-planet, it would take the will and possibly the need to do that.

Overall, all those concepts may indeed solve Fermi’s Paradox, though none of them are absolute.

The Rare Earth hypothesis may not mean we are alone, but it may mean civilizations are indeed extremely rare.

The small window of opportunity to use cheap energy sources (if they are available in the first place!) may not stop a civilization from leaving its home-planet, but it may make things much more difficult. And cheap energy on the home-planet may also induce the species to enjoy all it can on its home-planet with silly things like storing countless nuclear weapons, SUVs and private jets. Also, chemical rockets. It may boost civilization, but it may also blow up the planet.

And then, what is very likely, the huge distances between the stars may mean that there could be absolutely no reward on expanding to such distances. It may only be possible with automated probes that could take too much time to reach their destination and provide no benefit to the builders for millions of years.

There’s just one problem, though. The Fermi Paradox only takes one single civilization to dedicate itself, for whatever reason, to colonize the Galaxy for a few million years. There are also many other different concepts for interstellar colonization. A Von Neumann probe could do it.

Observation suggests not one single civilization did that in the whole history of our Galaxy, and as far was we know, the entire Universe (there are no visibly engineered galaxies). The Paradox is still there. My obvious guess is that’s something to do with some fundamental thing about the Universe we still don’t have any idea about.

The Fermi Paradox may be the single most fundamental question of 20th century science. We now know how puzzling it really is — before that, we didn’t know how large and how old the Universe is, we also didn’t really know much about the other planets and the fact there is no sign of intelligent life out there.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted in Science | 3 comments