Return of the Giant Purple Orb

Photo date: April 23, 2015. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

My extraordinary experience on this night is best told chronologically with pictures. Let me give a series of pictures that will show what I encountered. The photos were taken with a full-spectrum camera, which lets in more infrared light than the average camera.

After taking several pictures which showing nothing very unusual, I took this picture of the sky and some buildings at 8:34 PM, which also showed nothing unusual.

But then I took another picture of the night sky at 8:34, and something unusual showed up.  Below is the full picture uploaded directly from the camera. The camera was not pointing at any light. 

The picture below was also taken at 8:34, and shows an even brighter purple orb, as well as three large red orbs. Below is the full picture uploaded directly from the camera. The camera was not pointing at any bright light. (This picture in its full resolution with the original EXIF data can be downloaded by clicking here.)

At 8:36 I took a photo of the street ahead of me. There was no sign of any orbs. This shows that it was not some camera malfunction that was causing the previous picture.

At 8:37 I took another picture of the sky, and it seemed that the huge purple orb could be seen again, although not as bright as before.

At 8:38 I took another picture of the sky, and it seemed that the huge purple orb could be seen again, although not as bright as at 8:36.

But a photo at 8:39 showed no such orb. Below is the full photo taken at that time.

But at 8:40 the orb was back again.

But the next photo, also taken at 8:40, showed no such orb.

I then took several photos of the sky, and did not see the purple orb. For example, this one was taken at 8:48.

There was no fog, mist, or precipitation on this night. The air quality was very good because of a stiff wind. Airnow.gov listed the air quality in New York City on this night as 25 (anything below 50 is rated as "good" on this site).  When the air quality is that good, the particle sizes in outdoor air are about 1000 times too small to produce conspicuous orbs in photos.

Dust cannot possibly account for the orb observed in the third photo in this post, as that orb was 81% of the original photo height, and the largest dust orbs are no greater than 10% of the original photo height (the largest dust orb I've ever seen in several experiments with heavy dust was only about 5% of the original photo height).

My experience on this night was very similar to what I described in this post, when I also observed a giant purple air orb repeatedly. As none of the photos showing the huge purple orb were taken facing a bright light, we cannot explain these observations as being the result of lens flare (which only occurs when pointing the camera at a bright light).

The three red orbs shown in the third photo look similar to photos made on this page of the "Orbs & More" site.