Location of Sighting: Clarksville, Texas
Date of Sighting: July 30, 2016
Time of Sighting: 10:47 CDT
PHOTO OF STRANGE PATTERN OF LIGHTS.
Description: I caught this in a timed exposure just messing around in the backyard. This is a cropped image. The original file is 8.89 MB. I’m not sure what it is. The photo was taken in Clarksville Texas. I did not see this with my eyes and only saw it after looking at the photo. The photo was shot with Nikon D330 camera at F1.8, ISO 800 and the exposure time was 26.2 seconds. The camera was sitting straight up in a lawn chair. What sticks out to me is the five stars in a line and it looks like a shadow on top or a dark line.
Note: The pattern of lights could be an object? It is not a pattern of satellites. There are military satellites that move in triad formations, but that doesn’t explain the above photo. The pattern is unusual and perhaps could be two objects? The witness did not see the lights and only found them when later viewing the photo.
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A time lapse photo could have picked up the blinking light of an airplane which would look like a sequence of dots in a row.
Look at the main photo, you can see stars in alignments in several places. The fact that the observer didn’t see the pattern with his naked eye means nothing. With a 26 second exposure at f1.8, he’s likely going to photograph fainter stars than he can see visually.
That’s either an asterism or maybe an “open cluster” of stars. The ~ 26 second exposure captured stars fainter than he could see by naked eye alone.