A Fast Orb Making a Sharp Right-Angle Turn

Photo date: October 28, 2014.  Photographer: Mark Mahin.

This photo of a wall seems to show a moving orb making a dramatically sharp right-angle turn. A photo like this cannot at all be explained as being a photo of an insect. No fast-moving insect ever makes a change in direction as sharp as we see here. Furthermore, the photo was taken  indoors in a place where no flying insects had been observed during the past two months.

Since my camera has a shutter speed of 1/2000 of an second, a photo like this indicates very rapid movement -- movement greater than 100 miles an hour. The top speed of house flies, by comparison, is only about 5 miles an hour. The technical name that photographers use for this effect (of seeing the same object more than once in a photograph, because of high-speed motion by that object) is ghosting.


This is the 8th photo this blog has shown of this type of motion anomaly. For the other 7, see my posts labeled "orb right angle turn."

Dust reading: 330/2, Fair. Nearby reflective surfaces: none. The orb was about 8% of the vertical height of the full picture. No orbs shown in photos taken at same location from same angle soon before and soon after this photo was taken, which argues against any dust explanation. The photographer had short hair, and this cannot be explained as a hair.