danscool Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 Hi everyone. i thought this was a rather interesting story, i saw an article in the daily mail (U.K), last saturday i think. The article was talking about orbs, strange unexplainabe circles of light appearing on some photographs. at first i thought it may have been a hoax but after a little bit of reasearch it appears that several scientists are of the opinion that orbs exist, there have also apparently been thousands of photos from all around the world with them in. I was just wondering if anyone has experienced this phenominon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yann1 Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 Don't take me as an arrogant person (to tell the truth I'm not expert on orbs, and trully respect scientists) but some scientists are probably not aware of "flare"... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
martin_howard1 Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 Bbits of dust floating around in front of the lens lit by the onboard flash of a cheap P&S. thats is what your 'orbs' are. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
martin_howard1 Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 A technical explanation from wikipedia: A solid orb, or dust orb, is created because a reflective solid airborne particle, such as a dust particle, is situated near the camera lens and outside the depth of field, in other words out of focus. The pinpoint of light reflected from the dust particle that would be seen if it were at the hyperfocal distance, the distance from the film or charge-coupled device (CCD) to the object being photographed wherby the object is in focus as accurately as possible, grows into a circle of confusion with increasing distance from it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danscool Posted July 27, 2007 Author Share Posted July 27, 2007 martain, that explanation seems to make sence to me, however the article in the paper discounted this by saying that if they used two cameras simultaniously one of them would show an "orb" and the other wouldn't. i'm not quite sure of the details to that experiment. but yea, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Currie Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 Take a P&S camera out on a rainy day and you'll get orbs galore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Laur Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 Daniel: Two cameras shooting at the same scene at the same time are NOT going to catch the same dust particle with its luck-of-the-draw reflective surface(s) drifting into just the same angle (relative to the particular camera and its flash). This whole this is just so laughable - or, would be, if it didn't (along with illuminating out of focus dust and water droplets) illuminate just how poor most people are at simple critical thinking, or how anxious people are to look for a glimpse of something supernatural when the actual real world is right there waiting to be seen and understood (dust particles and all). This whole topic says more about our culture than it does about proliferation of cameras catching out-of-focus floaty bits in the air and, through aggressive JPG sharpening, producing artifacts in an image that look like the ghost of Aunt Tilley holding her favorite vintage turkey baster. *sigh* The test they SHOULD have done? Do this in an industrial clean room (with super-filtered air), and then do it again after beating a carpet in the air. But then we'd have an article about how beating Persian Carpets summons up Persian Orb Genies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pjmeade Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 Hmm, 1)Daily Mail 2)Not all scientists are that bright (I've worked with some PhDs who were pretty stupid). Yann and Martin probably have their finger on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jennifer_durand Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 Is this not "doughnut" phenomena that sometimes appear on catadiopetric lenses? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alex_lofquist Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 Examine closely the shape of an orb when the lens is somewhat stopped dowm! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnw436 Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 I have never photographed an orb, but have seen many with my eyes. Most pictures of orbs I have seen appear to be lens flare or dust or camera movement where there is a bright spot in the frame. The pictures I have looked at most often don't look like the orbs I have witnessed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDMvW Posted July 27, 2007 Share Posted July 27, 2007 As for these "scientists"--who ARE they? All the UFO guys on TV are "scientists", ditto for the "creation scientists". Real scientists publish in peer-reviewed journals, not in fringe publications or the newspapers. I predict you will find it difficult to impossible to find any serious scientific journal that has published on 'orbs' or whatever they called those thingies that were supposed to flash across video pictures. The magazine Skeptical Inquirer has published on these and the serious consensus appears to be in the lens flare, reflection, etc. camp. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jp.pfister Posted July 28, 2007 Share Posted July 28, 2007 Check out this thread from 2004, it's about an orb, or weird ball, but much funnier. http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=008NTu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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