Giant Purple Orb "Follows the Script"

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

Periodically when I go out to photograph at night, I will get a giant purple orb in my photos, as you can see in my posts labeled "giant purple air orb." On pretty much any night I get a series of photos showing such a thing, it is as if some giant purple orb was "following a script," in the sense that the same distinctive things are seen.  The "script" goes like this:

(1) I will notice a giant purple orb on the left edge of my photo (never the right edge), with the photo showing only the left half of the orb.
(2) The orb seems to appear in about 8 to 20 of the next photos I take.
(3) As I am taking these photos, whenever I point my camera downward and photograph the ground, the orb will no longer be seen.  But it will be then seen again as soon as I point my camera up at the sky.
(4) After about 8 to 12 photos, the orb will start to fade away, until it no longer is seen. No further photos that night will show the giant purple orb.

Yesterday I again saw exactly this pattern being "acted out."  The photos below are all uploaded directly from the camera, without any cropping or color adjustment.

After appearing less brightly in a few photos, the orb showed up brightly in the photo below taken at 9:32 PM.

The next photo (taken also at 9:32 PM) showed the giant purple orb behind a fence. A closeup inspection of the top fence will show that the area in front of the orb looks no different from the area to the right of the orb, clearly indicating the orb was behind the fence that was more than a meter from my camera.

The next photo (taken at 9:33 PM) shows the giant purple orb halfway blocked by a concrete barrier, further showing that it was not within arm's length of my camera. Note also the two other orbs in the top of the photo, one of which is a rare orange orb.

Then I took a photo of the ground (also at 9:33), which showed no sign of the orb.

But the next photo (also at 9:33) showed the orb appearing again, clearly behind the barrier more than a meter from my camera.

Then after turning 180 degrees I took a photo at 9:34, in which the orb was again clearly visible, along with another orb floating in the middle of the photo.

The next few photos also showed the orb, but it seemed to fade away, seeming to get a little dimmer in each photo. After about 10 more photos, there was no sign of the orb.

The fact that these photos were taken in very dark locations (with no bright light nearby) rules out the possibility that lens flare was causing this. The appearance of the orb behind the distant obstruction rules out dust as an explanation, as does the huge size of the orb (no one ever photographs dust orbs looking even half as big as this object).

So far (in my posts labeled "giant purple air orb") I have about 35 photographs of such an orb, with it always appearing on the left side of the photo. A rough calculation of the probability of this occurring by chance would be 1 in X, where X is 2 raised to the 35th power, which is a probability of about 1 in 34 billion.

There was no fog,mist, rain, or precipitation on this night. I forgot to check the air quality at airnow.gov, but I can see from this link that the local air quality in New York City was good.