Flare(?) with sharp, immediate changes of illumination? Is this is a known product?

[water_buffet]

Hi, I need help identifying these lights in the sky. These videos come from the Israel/Palestine conflict:



I've downloaded one of the videos and the choppiness doesn't appear to be from a slow frame rate. Reason this is somewhat interesting to me is I've seen other purported UAP videos (not related to this event) that contain similar behavior of choppy intervals of illumination/delumination. Would be interested to know if anyone here recognizes this as a known type of flare or something. From my limited searching around, flares typically show a gradual illumination/delumination through I assume a chemical combustion reaction. This thing appears to have something more like electronic brightness control (like an LED) to achieve the sharp, immediate changes in brightness. But maybe I'm way off in my intuition. Any flare experts here? Thanks!

 

[John J.]

The lights look very much like battlefield illumination flares.
They appear to be viewed through smoke, so the brightness varies.

Large illumination flares can be fired from mortars or from launchers like the 84mm Carl Gustav, as well as being air-dropped.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

See this thread: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/strange-lights-over-las-vegas-april-25-2023.12946/#post-289814

And This: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/sa...efield-illumination-flares.12491/#post-272798

 

[water_buffet]

The lights look very much like battlefield illumination flares.
They appear to be viewed through smoke, so the brightness varies.

Large illumination flares can be fired from mortars or from launchers like the 84mm Carl Gustav, as well as being air-dropped.

See this thread: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/strange-lights-over-las-vegas-april-25-2023.12946/#post-289814

And This: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/san-diego-ufos-–-more-battlefield-illumination-flares.12491/#post-272798

Thanks for digging up those threads. And thanks for the search term "battlefield illumination flares". I'm getting more hits with that.

What about the choppiness, or the discrete jumps of illumination (especially in the one with 3 lights)? Have you guys seen that behavior in flares? Looking through your links, I don't see a similar behavior. This is the behavior that most drew me to what I posted. Maybe it is just an artifact of the video footage? I was refraining from downloading and analyzing frames in the 1st one, as it's a recording of a recording. I'll download it and see if I can find movement in the footage in between the illumination jumps (movement that is not part of the scene within the room being recorded from).

Other than the choppiness in context of other purported UAP videos, this wouldn't have caught my attention. Obviously bright-ass lights over a battlefield is most likely flares. But there's also a narrative of UAPs being attracted to interesting human events or technologies.

 

[Ravi]

It 100% looks like illumination flares to me. The choppyness could be the webcam that is being used. I saw those flares being deployed yesterday, live, in the reuters stream. Did not flag it as being something odd in a war.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

Mostly it's because the flares burn unevenly.

 

[FatPhil]

Mostly it's because the flares burn unevenly.

Indeed, and that's because properly mixed powders are surprisingly hard to achieve. They separate (use the term "segregate" if you want to go googling) into their individual components for a wide range of reasons - different particle size, different density, and all kinds of electrostatic properties such as different propensity to cohere via molecular-level forces, etc..

To long a pipe between the mixer and the nozzle? Your chemicals have become unmixed. Not tightly enough packed in the final product? Tough - your chemicals are going to become unmixed.

It literally is rocket science!

 

[Ravi]

Mostly it's because the flares burn unevenly.

Not that I don't agree, but perhaps it is wise to include some proof of this, as this question will come up more often, I am sure.

 

[Ann K]

I've downloaded one of the videos and the choppiness doesn't appear to be from a slow frame rate.

I think it is a slow frame rate. On the horizon toward the left side there are lights (anti-aircraft fire? Rockets launching? Something benign?) that flash in different spots at precisely the same time as the illumination choppiness.

This is from a webcam whose parameters are not known, as @Ravi mentioned. It is being recorded from a broadcast on television so the actual frame rate of the recording you see is not the same as the actual frame rate of the initial webcam.

I'm not a photo expert but other here are, and may enlarge upon this. My question for the photo pros: do webcams automatically adjust so that a brilliant illumination might cause the camera to change exposure?