Solved: Strange Beam of Light over Mayan Temple and Florida [Lightning + Rolling Shutter Artifact]



The above images are examples of a rolling shutter artifact. A "rolling shutter" means that the image is recorded one row (or column in portrait orientation) at a time, and not simultaneously. This means if the exposure and the flash are of very short duration, then the flash will only illuminate some pixel rows (or columns) of the image. Slowed down it looks a bit like this:

The green rectangle is the rolling shutter window - what the camera sees of the scene at any one time, and it builds up the actual photo by reading from this rectangle. The flash of lighting is very short, but still lights up all the pixels in the rolling shutter window, causing the "beam".

Here's what's going on in the first image. Notice the beam also shows up in the reflection.



And with the Mayan temple, the lighting is behind the temple, so it only lights up the sky, and not the temple itself. So it looks like the "beam" goes behind the temple.






This can be replicated with a flash set to strobe, and taking lots of photos or video with an iPhone:


The fact that the "beam" can go "behind" the clouds can seem confusing in a still image. But it's really just that the lightning is behind the clouds, and they are thick enough to block the light. I simulated a similar effect using the flash and a foam pool toy. If the flash is in front of the toy then it illuminates it, and you get the stripe across the toy. If the flash is moved behind the toy, then the toy is not illuminated, so the "beam" (the stripe of the image) looks like it's going behind the toy.





It looks like the flash is not actually working, however you have to remember that for most of the frame, it's actually off. The only time the flash is on is during the white bar.

In my image the flash gives a white light (as a camera flash is obviously intended to), but lightning often shows up as a purple or pink tinge:


Typical lightning photography with a rolling shutter looks more like half the image being lit by lightning, rather than the column we see above. Here's a more typical lightning shot at night with this problem:
http://www.productionapprentice.com/tutorials/ccd-vs-cmos/


Notice it's horizontal. The image is scanned one row at a time, but when you take a photo in portrait mode, then those rows are the columns.

Here I've repeated the flash experiment in a darker setting, and we get the half-illuminated image:



Update Aug 15 2015, a new example:

source, location

Here the illusion of it being a beam behind the clouds is particularly striking, as a band of dark clouds is partially obscuring the illuminated clouds behind. You can see part of the lightning bolt just below the power lines. Remember it's not actually a beam of light, it's just a slice of a scene as it would look illuminated by lightening.

This can be especially confusing when you notice the reflection of the "beam" on the hood of the car. Your brain naturally interpret this as a reflection of the scene, and so you think there's actually a beam in the sky. But if you look closely, you'll see the reflection in the hood is actually of a slightly different are of the sky. The "reflection" lines up perfectly vertically, whereas the nearby traffic signals are sloped. If this actually was a reflection of a beam in the sky, then it would also be sloped.



So while it's a reflection of sky illuminated by lighting, it's not the same area of the sky. It's a little unintuitive.

So again, what we are seeing here is essentially one normal image overlaid with a slice of another image that's illuminate by lighting. (And note that what looks like the reflection of a building in the lower right is actually the reflection of the air conditioning vent inside the car)

Warning: Complicated Explanation Ahead!

A very unintuitive topic here is the width of the band. Why does a long exposure (in a dark setting) give a wide band, but the short exposure (in sunlight) give a narrow band? You would think that if the exposure is short, then more of that exposure would be happening during the flash, so the band would be wider.

The first thing here is that the flash I use only has a duration of 1/5000th of a second (0.2 ms), so if things work the way the previous paragraph suggested, then the most we could illuminate would be a band 1/166th the width of the image (in portrait orientation), and yet we see that we can get half or more of the image illuminated. So what's going on? How can a 1/166th of a frame exposure illuminate half the lines in a frame? And why does it it get narrower for shorter exposures?

The answer is complicated. CMOS sensors can only be read one line at a time, and yet the exposures can happen simultaneously (or at least overlap). So the reset of each line (the start of when it begins to record) is staggered to match the read-out speed, and the exposure length is actually on an individual line basis.

The diagram below is showing the "flash window" - i.e. the portion of a frame in which you can fire the flash and have it affect all the rows. Normally when you use the flash, then it's quite dark and so you have a long exposure, and hence quite a big window in which you can fire the flash, If you were to go outside of this window, you'd get the top or the bottom of the image only illuminated by the flash.


Source

In brighter conditions, the per-line exposures are shorter, so it's more like:


Notice the read-out of the lines (green)is the same angle, as that can't get any faster. This also dictates when the reset (blue) happens. But now that the exposure time (red) is much shorter, only a few lines can get exposed during the flash. Hence the "beam" is narrower for a shorter exposure.

So the width (or height in landscape) of the beam are actually dependent on three factors
  1. The exposure duration - the red lines above.
  2. The rolling speed - how quickly does the "rolling shutter" move across the sensor. Determined here by read-out speed - the green line.
  3. The flash duration (the yellow bar)
This gives us a minimum width of the "beam". It's the duration of the flash, divided by the read-out cycle time (i.e. the time between starting two consecutive read-outs). The faster the camera's read-out time, the smaller the potential "beam" and the sharper the edges.

Why sharp edges? The start and end of the flash might also occur during the reset or read-out phase of the lines, meaning that line only gets partially exposed to the flash. This means the edges of the "beam" are not always sharp.

The narrowest possible beam comes from a combination of short exposure and short flash. Here I took individual photos in bright sunlight, which gave an Exposure Time of 1/3300. The flash is 0.2ms, or 1/5000 of a second, about 2/3 the duration of a single Exposure time. Here's what we got:

Zoomed in:


So we have a 36 pixel wide beam on a 2488 wide image. There are really lines (as the camera is just rotated 90 degrees). Only half the pixels in the middle are a solid bright color - that would be where the flash fell entirely within the exposure time. The colored pixels on either side indicate where the flash only partially was within the actual exposure time, with the different colors indicating different contributions from the red, green and blue sensors as they are read at out different times.


For a discussion of Rolling Shutters in SLR cameras, see:
https://www.metabunk.org/will-an-sl...ts-like-a-beam-of-light-with-lightning.t6718/

Note: The above post is a summary post from material in the discussion thread below, hence the subsequent discussion might seem somewhat redundant. Updated with the Florida photo on 8/15/2015
 
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The thread is getting a lot of traffic about this image:


So I have updated the OP to collate the information in the thread.
 
That's a nice example, with the "beam" largely going behind the trees. But you can still see some lightening of the trees, and pinkish reflections off the boat.
 
Another from the video linked in the comments:

Attributed to Raine Carosin
Raine Carosin-It's 17h12, 13 November 2012, Tuesday... I've just taken a few shots at 16h30 on my way to the shops, and while I was taking the third shot, there appeared to be a blinding flash of light in a nano of a second, and I looked around but I didn't ask anybody coz it seemed stupid, and I thought it was just me again, and so, I came home and rushed to get the photos developed to send them to the weather site I support, and by and large, you can see what appears to be like a giant searchlight or spotlight in the third photograph... weird... can anybody shed some light on this?
Content from External Source
 
"Rushed to get the photos DEVELOPED"?

As we discussed earlier in the thread, the same phenomenon can happen with a film camera or with a digital camera, since they both use rolling shutters that only expose a small amount of the film or collect data from a slice of the sensor at a time, at least at very high shutter speeds. See post #40 in this thread. So, even though the technology is somewhat different, both film cameras and digital cameras use rolling shutters, and you should expect to see this kind of exposure artifact under certain conditions with both of them.
 
As we discussed earlier in the thread, the same phenomenon can happen with a film camera or with a digital camera, since they both use rolling shutters that only expose a small amount of the film or collect data from a slice of the sensor at a time, at least at very high shutter speeds. See post #40 in this thread. So, even though the technology is somewhat different, both film cameras and digital cameras use rolling shutters, and you should expect to see this kind of exposure artifact under certain conditions with both of them.

I think here they are simply using "developed" to mean "downloaded"
 
Is this the same effect on a picture of the Tianjin explosion site?


It doesn't look as sharply defined as the others.
 
Looks like photoshop to me.

...

The explosion happened at night. Do they really think they can get away with photoshopping a photo of the aftermath and calling it evidence?

Probably. What's worse they're likely right.
 
Hi everyone.
Since how long do these shutter artifacts occur? Only lately we are seeing this showing up in social media etc... Could it be that the Mayan temple photo atracted peoples attention to it?.
Thanks,
Frank
 
Hi everyone.
Since how long do these shutter artifacts occur? Only lately we are seeing this showing up in social media etc... Could it be that the Mayan temple photo atracted peoples attention to it?.
Thanks,
Frank

I think in part it's due to improved camera technology for the cheap CMOS sensors, allowing shorter (per row) exposures, which are more likely to give a "beam". Perviously you'd be more likely to just get half the image washed out, which does not look very interesting, and such photos would generally be discarded. Stuff like:
 
Hi everyone.
Since how long do these shutter artifacts occur? Only lately we are seeing this showing up in social media etc... Could it be that the Mayan temple photo atracted peoples attention to it?.
Thanks,
Frank

It's possible, at least for these partial exposure artifacts due to lightning. A similar photo was uploaded to Wikipedia last August for the rolling shutter page.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/898303

This documents a (different)rolling shutter artifact in 2011.

Its unclear to me how often lightning bolts occur with a short enough duration to show this partial exposure. Of course, the more CMOS phone cameras in use, the more we can expect to see these artifacts. The increase in camera quality in low light conditions probably also contributes.

Short answer to why now: Dunno.
 
I think the Mayan temple photo probably was the thing that made it popular though. The Florida photo kind of built on that and bumped it up to the next level, pushing awareness of the phenomena to a broader audience, and hence encouraging people to post their photos.

This thread has over 344,000 views, and about 280,000 of those were in the last three days, about the Florida pic.
 
Thank you for replying on this. Yes I suppose the quicker cmos readings and thus, creating a smaller column will have a very large impact. I've noticed that some people are going really nuts on this pictures. Even after giving an understandable explication and linking to the clear info i got from here, they won't except it. Crazy .. Those 300.000 + views worldwide does not surprise me :) ... Thanks again !
 
Another one to add to the collection. It would be nice to know who made the original post.

shutter.jpg
https://www.facebook.com/groups/globalskywatch/permalink/10155952210760302/

A different person posted this pic on facebook and asked the question 'Project blue beam?'.

Harry Rhodes commented 'There is a patent on this...'. I have no idea what 'Project blue beam' is but I am sure if it exists it wouldn't be caused by a camera shutter.

[Broken External Image]:http://[img]http://i.imgur.com/ceLYm8Q.jpg[/IMG]

[Broken External Image]:http://[img]http://i.imgur.com/mO8NbdI.jpg[/IMG]

*having probs uploading photo's
 
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Here are some "strange" vertical beams during a recording. I'm not sure if they are of the "shutter-roll type", or internal lens reflections......?? (May, 2012)
 
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Here are some "strange" vertical beams during a recording. I'm not sure if they are of the "shutter-roll type", or internal lens reflections......?? (May, 2012)


That's a different thing. CCD blooming. Super bright light overflows into adjacent cells in a column. Different ttype of sensor too.

Rolling shutter artificts only happen when the scene is changing (flashing, or moving).
 
This alternative explanation is rather amusingly speculative:
https://kauilapele.wordpress.com/20...eams-of-lights-are-seen-all-around-the-world/

It seems unlikely that all these beams are just natural phenomena, camera malfunction or a digital cam glitch.

Could it be that the sun’s solar radiation interacts deep within the Earth’s magnetic field adhering to the planet’s magnetic lines and what we see as a beam of light are in fact the ionized particles charged from the sun’s solar wind or is there something going on?
...
Is it coincidence that all these beams and strange objects near the sun become visible in the same period and is it that alien races are responsible for the strange lights in the sky?

Are they stabilizing the earth with these beams as Nibiru/Planet X is closing in?
Content from External Source
 
Project Blue Beam has pretty much nothing to do with actual blue beams. It's a very strange and complicated apocalyptic believe system involving projecting images of Jesus, etc. onto the sky and/or people's minds with various "rays".

http://www.thewatcherfiles.com/bluebeam.html

Not worth addressing.

You may have misunderstood why I posted that. It was to show Harry Rhodes trying to deceive people by using an easily debunked picture to spread more bunk. I had no idea and was not interested in what project blue beam was but thanks for filling me in at least now I know when I see people talking about it :)
 
Good evening all. I've reviewed the posts and understand the explanations, however I witnessed this first hand today, and managed to catch it on video. Any further ideas?
 
Hi Saira.

This is exactly the same thing. It's just not particularly bright - the lighting was probably off to the side somewhere. All it did was brighten up the scene a bit, and the rolling shutter got a slice of that brighter scene.
 
Thank you for your response. I would agree, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. My eyes were not on my phone's screen. I was standing in the parking lot of my job looking for cars and making sure I wasn't in any immediate danger. I didn't witness this on screen. I only looked for it afterwards because it seemed off. There has to be another explanation.
 
Thank you for your response. I would agree, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. My eyes were not on my phone's screen. I was standing in the parking lot of my job looking for cars and making sure I wasn't in any immediate danger. I didn't witness this on screen. I only looked for it afterwards because it seemed off. There has to be another explanation.

Possibly what you saw was some kind of after-image from the flash, your eye movement, and the edge of the building.

Notice that it is exactly pixel pefect aligned with the sensor.


If it was some kind of beam, it would be pretty unlikely you'd get it lined up. And even if you did, perspective would make it wider at the bottom. Like:


Yours is the same all the way up.

And given that it happened in a storm, everything points to rolling shutter + lighting
 
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In the photo with the cars, how is the "beam of light" behind the clouds?
The lightning is behind the clouds. Think of it as a slice of a different photo with brighter lighting overlaid on the rest. The location of the temporary light source (in this case lightning) will obey all the normal rules - backlighting, reflection, etc. - in the sliver of photo it effects.
 
Thank you for your response. I would agree, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. My eyes were not on my phone's screen. I was standing in the parking lot of my job looking for cars and making sure I wasn't in any immediate danger. I didn't witness this on screen. I only looked for it afterwards because it seemed off. There has to be another explanation.

You would have seen the flash as the lightning lit up the scene, but the actual source of the light (the lightning bolt) probably wasn't visible to you (it certainly isn't present in the field of view of the camera). So all your eye would see is the bright flash with no obvious source.
 
Siliezar, who recently shared his photographs with occult investigators, told Earthfiles.com that he and his family didn't see the light beam in person; it appeared only on camera. "It was amazing!" he said. He showed the iPhone photo to his fellow tourists. "No one, not even the tour guide, had ever seen anything like it before."
Content from External Source
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46560621/...show-sign-gods-or-iphone-glitch/#.UxuesvldXbM
I saw around 11 or 12 beams/columns of light that lasted for hours above the cities of east Wenatchee and Wenatchee Washington about 3 years ago. I had a dead cell phone and no way to take pictures. I know what I saw, it was not a trick of light or ice crystals, not lightening, not my imagination. My friend and I tried to find the source and looked for 30 to 45 mins but never could reach the base. The light was definitely coming down from the sky and none seemed to have any specific targets, but random. We gave up looking for the source and quite frankly I was scared because there is no explanation to what they were, or why they were there.....but we went on half way up a mountain to observe. The beams of light lasted hours. And it didn't look anything like the different camera effects examples but just like the picture of the lightning, but there was no lightning on this night and the beams lasted for hours, or is that normal for lightning to stay like that for hours?
 


The above images are examples of a rolling shutter artifact. A "rolling shutter" means that the image is recorded one row (or column in portrait orientation) at a time, and not simultaneously. This means if the exposure and the flash are of very short duration, then the flash will only illuminate some pixel rows (or columns) of the image. Slowed down it looks a bit like this:

[moderator edit: long OP ]
I saw the beams of light above my home town and I can't explain what it was, I didn't take pictures, and they lasted for hours, about 11 or 12 columns of light shining from the sky, on a cloudy night with temperatures above freezing and no lightning. What did I see? Can you explain it because it baffles my brain.
 
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I saw the beams of light above my home town and I can't explain what it was, I didn't take pictures, and they lasted for hours, about 11 or 12 columns of light shining from the sky, on a cloudy night with temperatures above freezing and no lightning. What did I see? Can you explain it because it baffles my brain.

Could they have been beams of light from the ground, rather than the sky?

image.jpeg

image.jpeg
 
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