NUFORC Sighting 66144

Occurred: 2008-10-07 12:00 Local
Reported: 2008-10-09 13:52 Pacific
Duration: 5 seconds
No of observers: 1

Location: Angel Fire, NM, USA

Shape: Other

Noticed object in photo while downloading from camera to computer.

I was near the end of shooting about 300 photos of local autumn scenery and stopped at a friend's house to shoot a panoramic view of the Moreno Valley I knew could be seen from his main deck. As I was returning to my car, I noticed a flower pot on another small deck which juts out from the living room of his house about 12-15 feet above the driveway. The flowers hanging over the pot looked pretty against the bright blue cloudless sky, so I shot four pictures in a row of them, from about 20 feet away, using a telephoto lens. (The first shot was a "single;" the next three were a "burst.") The shots were aimed up toward the sky, slightly north, but mostly to the west. Cloudless sky, no wind.

I noticed an "spot" in photo one (of the four I shot of that scene) when quickly scanning through the photos as I transferred them from my camera to my computer. Since I hadn't noticed anything in the sky when I shot the photo, I thought maybe the "spot" resulted from a "glitch" in the camera. I made a copy of the photo at full size and enlarged it in Photoshop, then enlarged the section with the "spot" in it again and "enhanced" it using the Photoshop Unsharp Mask filter at the following settings: Amount-500; Radius-25; Threshold-15. In the enlarged enhanced view, the "spot" appeared to be a solid object, and not the result of a camera malfunction. The object appears appears golden/golden-red in color and to have sled-type runners or pontoons attached to its underside. It I checked and rechecked the other three photos of the same scene and found no trace of the object in any of them.

I mentally retraced my activities to determine the time when I shot the photo and then did test shots with the same camera to determine the amount of time which elapsed between the first and last photos in the scene (five seconds).

Camera: Fuji S100, 12 megapixels. Setting for all four photos: automatic. I have saved all four original photos

NUFORC Note:

We believe obj. is flower petal, or butterfly. PD

Posted 2008-10-31