Today where I live the air quality is very poor, because of smoke from wild fires in Canada. Below is the reading I got tonight when I typed in my zip code at www.airnow.gov. This is the worst I have ever seen the air quality where I live.
One of my daughters showed me a picture she took of the sun today, and it showed a pinkish look -- apparently an effect caused by reflection of dust particles. But this very bad air produced no orbs. I took some photos outside, within a few minutes of getting the reading above -- my usual flash photos. No orbs showed up. Below is an example of a full flash photo I took outdoors at the same time as getting the air quality reading above. We see no orbs.
In my life I have never found that natural smoke or natural smog or natural dust ever produces circular shapes in photos. Basically the only natural things that ever do that are rainfall, fog or mist. Heavy mist, in particular, will fill a whole photo (or most of it) with circular shapes when you photograph outdoors using a flash photo. No one will be likely to mistake such a thing for a mysterious orb, because the whole photo (or most of it) fills up with dim little translucent circular shapes that are all the same size and dim white color. You can see an example near the end of my post here.
The infographic below shows the difference in particle sizes between smoke/smog, fog and mist.
The particles in ordinary outdoor air are usually only about 1 micron (1 μm) in size. The particles in ordinary indoor air are usually no more than about 10 micron in size. My post here explains why particles that size are way too small to produce a decent-sized orb in a photo. Figuring out whether an orb false alarm could be produced by a particle of a particular size is a matter of comparing the particle size to the size of the camera lens you are using, and I do that in that post. Because I am aware of how heavy mist and rain can produce "orb false alarms," I have been careful to record weather conditions when I photographed outdoors. Almost all of my photos of mysterious orbs outdoors contain statements such as "there was no fog, mist or precipitation when this photo was taken."
