Monday, August 31, 2015

The Bright Blue Orb and the Big Orbs

Photo date: August 26, 2015. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

In the photo below we see a bright blue orb mysteriously floating above the Met Life building in New York City.

bright blue orb

On the same night I took the photo below showing two large purple orbs near the Met Life building. What we see below is the exact original photo, except that I decreased the "gamma correction" factor. Since the photo was not cropped, the larger orb is a full 12% of the original height. Such an orb is way too big to be a particle of dust.  Given an area of about 15000 microns (15 millimeters) just in front of a camera lens, a dust particle would have to be about 1800 microns to appear as large as this in a photo.  But in fact, even in a choking dust storm, the suspended dust particles are no larger than 1000 microns (and the actual airborne dust particles on a night like this only have an average size of about 1 micron).

big orbs

There was no fog, mist, rain, or precipitation on this night. The air quality listed on airnow.gov was "good."

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