Saturday, July 25, 2015

Amazing Arrangement

Photo date: July 22, 2015. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

The photo below shows the sky above buildings on Fifth Avenue in New York City.  We see some large orbs in a line. It reminds me of a scene in the movie The Fifth Element, where you see flying cars in lines above the city streets.

sky orbs

There was no fog, mist, rain, or precipitation on this night. The air quality listed on airnow.gov was good, with a rating of 23 (anything below 50 is considered good). The pollen level was medium.

On a clean air night like this, dust particles in the air have an average size of about 1 micron. But the area just in front of the lens of a point-and-click camera (like the one I used) is about 15,000 microns (or 15 millimeters). This means that the "blockage fraction" of this night's dust particles was only about 1/15,000 -- hundreds of times too small to produce orbs as large as the ones shown here.

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