Baffling Ascent of the Christmas Tree Light

Photo date: January 22, 2016. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

The photo below shows another example of what I photographed 8 days earlier (as shown here):  light from a Christmas tree mysteriously rising way up into the air. The camera was not moving when this photo was taken, as you can tell from the sharp, non-streaked details of the tree on the right, the wire, and even the branches on the left of the tree.

 Note that we don't see a streaking of light from the star on the top (as you might have seen if the camera had been moving), but instead a kind of seven-fold cloning of the image of the star, without any streaking between these "clones."

 
The top photo has been uploaded directly from the camera without any change. The exposure time was only 1/30 of a second.