"Pyramid" UFOs in Night Vision Footage are Bokeh

[john.phil]

It's great to see such clear examples of similar phenomenon being presented, but can you please remember to include links to the sources for your images.

They bear a lot in common with the images (Figures 41 and 45) from:
https://www.telescope-optics.net/coma.htm
https://www.telescope-optics.net/astigmatism1.htm
and I have no reason to doubt them, we just like the breadcrumbs.

I've added a source.

 

[FatPhil]

I've added a source.

Thanks!

I think. Those of you who use the full modern awe-inspiring power of the modern internet (to track you and shower you with smiley faces or hand gestures, but definitely cat pics, constantly) may be now enlightened, but alas Quora refuses to serve me any data at all unless I jump though pretzel-shaped loops that I'm not willing to go through. (Ditto X/Twitter, and many other sites.)

URLs and URIs are no longer uniform resource locations or identifiers, they are an arbitrary string that may work one day, and may not work the next. And for the unlucky luddites like me (who had a personal webpage on one of the first 1000-ish websites on "the internet" (i.e. www), so git orff moi lorn), that's a real issue. If the internet archive can scrape such sites, please get them to so do, because they, as long as they are an extant 503c3, will keep things in the same place, and won't rugpull. Unlike most of the rest of the internet. (For example, no, sorry, I can't provide a link to my webpage from 1993, the university's changed its name and 2ld twice since then.)

Fortunately, I recognise the artefacts you demonstrated, hence the ability to find similar diffraction effects. Heck, I see some of those looking at a point source!

So certainly at no point was there any thought of distrust. And as long as my loving fans trust me, everyone will trust you (Oh, come one, can't you tell I'm in a mischievous but light-hearted mood this evening?)

 

[Scaramanga]

I have edited Jesse's video to highlight the results of his experiments (original is ~27 min long, 4e4PdpsrRjQ on YouTube):

Just a short comment to get some clarification. In your video the triangle shape of the aperture only really appears with a quite narrow aperture. But surely for low light the aperture would have been wide open. Or is there some link between aperture and focus I'm not aware of ?

 

[Ravi]

Just a short comment to get some clarification. In your video the triangle shape of the aperture only really appears with a quite narrow aperture. But surely for low light the aperture would have been wide open. Or is there some link between aperture and focus I'm not aware of ?

There is. The aperture/iris has to be small (F/large) to be able to create a large Depth of Focus.

 

[john.phil]

Just a short comment to get some clarification. In your video the triangle shape of the aperture only really appears with a quite narrow aperture. But surely for low light the aperture would have been wide open. Or is there some link between aperture and focus I'm not aware of ?

In the video, it's not possible to see how wide the iris actually was during the imaging session. But it's the other way around, bokeh is more pronounced when the iris is wider (i.e. decreasing f-numbers f/4, f/2.8, f/2, f/1.4, and so on). Regardless, you can see in the video that even a cheap IR goggle has no problem imaging a light in the sky and the background stars, despite the supposedly narrow aperture.

 

[jarlrmai]

Lights from bright stars and planes can been seen by the human eye, a night vision device has no problem even with a smaller aperture, the reasons manually adjustable iris apertures are on these devices is to reduce glare from really relatively bright lights and to make them sharper in situations where you don't need to make the most of every photon.